What is ServiceNow

Before getting into the technical aspects of ServiceNow, let's try to understand what ServiceNow is and why we use ServiceNow. For this, we are going to take an example. And in this example we are going to use the service management. Let's say there is a company and it is providing certain services. And for this example, let's take this company is providing telecom and network services. And there will be a lot of customers for that. And let's say, one of the customer is facing some issues. Well, he is not able to see the network bars in his mobile. So let's say the customer is facing some issues with the network of this particular company. Now what this customer does is he has to reach out to this company and say that he is having this issues. He cannot directly reach out to the company right. So there will be certain service desk members, like he will be able to call certain customer care numbers right. So let's say this customer calls the service desk. And that particular service desk person will be the mediator between the customer and also the company. Let's try to understand a little deeper on this particular example. Well, the customer tries to reach out to the service desk personnel via an email or phone. Now, this service desk person tries to understand what this customer is facing, what issue this customer is facing, and this person will also try to gather as much information as possible. Like let's say, where from where this particular customer is calling, which location, and then what is his contact number. Additional details like his name and maybe account number and stuff like that. Like his mobile account number, something like that. Now this service desk personnel, based on the information given by the customer, like exactly what is the issue. Getting all these details, what this service desk team does is he will try to reach out to the appropriate team members in his company, in his or her company. So let's say in this example, we are saying that the customer is having issues with their network. So the service desk team reaches to appropriate network related team. Let's say there is a team which is team one, and they will be able to resolve these type of issues. So the service desk personnel will send out an email to team one saying that, hey, you know, this customer so-and-so name with so and so mobile number is having issues with the network. And then whatever details this service desk personnel has taken, he will be adding all those details in an email and he will send out to team one. Now this team one will try to resolve this issue. Well, if they are able to resolve it well and good. Great! But what if the team one is not able to resolve it? They will try to send an email, maybe forward this email to some other team, which is let's say team two. So they will try to resolve it if they can resolve it well and good. But again, if team two also believes that this issue is not something related to them, they will again try to forward it to appropriate team. Another thing that we need to keep in mind is a team does not contain just one person. There will be multiple members under a particular team. Let's say this team two, there are multiple team members. And one person might forward this issue Email to team three and other person might forward it to team four. Let's summarize the whole scenario. The customer has an issue, and then he reached out to the service desk via a phone or email and he shared all the details. Now the service desk personnel has sent out an email to team one, and then that particular email or the issue details has been moving forward and backward between multiple teams. At the end of the day, if the ticket is resolved or if the issue is resolved, it's good. But if the issue is not resolved, the customer or even the service desk personnel does not know exactly which team is working on this issue. Let's talk about some of the drawbacks of this particular methodology that we talked about, which is resolving an issue or doing the service management via an email. First of all, we cannot track the correct status. Maybe Team one is working on it, but then the one of the personnel has forwarded that email to team two. So maybe team two is also working on it. Maybe they have fixed it, but there is no proper track of the exact status of this issue. We are not even sure which team is working on it. It could be team one, team two, or team three or team four, but we don't know the exact team who is working on that issue. And then we don't have track of team's effort. Maybe team one has worked on certain time, like they worked for few hours and then team two worked for few hours. But we cannot track how much individual teams have worked on this particular issue. The next thing is we don't have the capability to do the reporting on these emails. We can just know how many emails are received, but we don't know how much, how many of these emails are related to network, how many are related to billing, how many are related to some other issue. So we don't have proper reporting feature on these emails. Next, we cannot track the SLA of this whole issue. So SLA is related to the timelines. Whenever we have an issue, we need to fix it in a stipulated time. So we'll be talking about this in the future sections. But yeah, we cannot track whether this issue has been fixed on certain timelines or not. Finally, as this email is being transferred to multiple teams, we don't even know which team is taking responsibility. Actually, no teams take any responsibility. For this, we have a new system. So let's talk about the same scenario in a slightly different situation. So we have the customer and service desk they contacted over the phone or email. Service desk team has all the details that the customer is facing the issue on. And then this service desk know that there are multiple teams. Team 1,2,3,4. Now instead of sending out an email. What if we have a single system? A single point system. Where, the service desk personnel can create a record in that, and that particular system is being used by all the team members. So anyone can log into the ServiceNow system. So that system is actually the ServiceNow system. Any personal team one, two, three, four or even service desk can log in to the ServiceNow. And then they can see a single record for that particular issue. With that, you don't have multiple records or multiple email situation wherein we earlier when we were sending out multiple emails, we don't know which particular team is working on right! So in this particular case, we'll just have a single record. And that single record will be assigned to a certain team. At any point of time, it will be assigned either to team one or to team 2 or 3 or four, or for team five, something like that. But at any point of time, if we check that record, we will exactly know who is working on it, and we will also get to know what is the current status of it. So the ServiceNow is a sophisticated ticketing system through which you can create the tickets or issues, and then those issues can be easily worked on by the internal teams. We'll get into the ServiceNow system we will understand more. But at a high level what ServiceNow does is it helps as a sophisticated ticketing system, wherein people submit their issues and people can the fulfiller people can actually look into those tickets and then resolve it. ServiceNow does much more than this, but keep that in mind that ServiceNow started just as a ticketing system. It expanded to multiple wings. But yeah, keep that in mind. Well, let's quickly talk about the key things about ServiceNow. ServiceNow is a SAAS and PAAS system, software as a service and platform as a service system. And as I initially mentioned, it started as an ITSM ticketing tool, which is information technology service management tool. It initially started only with that particular scope, but then it expanded to multiple branches like ITBM, ITAM, HRSD, CSM and stuff like that. Almost everything in ServiceNow is tables and records in a database. So we'll get to this topic once we talk about the core concepts of ServiceNow. Once we understand this key logic, which is almost everything in ServiceNow is tables and records, you will actually know the holistic picture of the whole ServiceNow architecture. I earlier mentioned that it expanded to multiple branches, like on the IT side we have ITSM, ITOM (IT Operations Management), ITBM, Software Asset Management. We even have hardware asset management. This whole picture gives a rough idea or just a glimpse of what ServiceNow is into. Let's do one quick thing. We'll jump back to the internet and then see these modules that ServiceNow is expanded to. So if you go to the Google and search for ServiceNow platform modules, go to the images and you'll see something like this. These are the different modules. Key modules. The IT the information technology and then the customer service. Then intelligent apps, HR, security, GRC governance, all these stuff comes into picture. This is the Itbm. These are different modules under which ServiceNow is working on, but it is expanding and it is always upgrading.