Last week James and I talked with Fred Luddy and Robert McNeill from Service-now.com. They offer a hosted help desk, CMDB, SLA management of the help desk functions, and an asset/change management stack. What are those things? In this case, they’re pretty sharply aligned with the ITIL ideas:
The help desk tracks incidents and problems, along with the work-flow for IT folks to actually do something with those “trouble tickets.”
The CMDB tracks all of the things IT pays attention to at an “asset management” level of detail (see below about monitoring): hardware, software, processes, roles, the relationships between all of those and, in the demo, the janitor and their various cleaning agents and duties ;>
The asset/change management stack is a collection of self-service and workflow UIs to do requests, e.g., a requests for new hardware (like a new laptop), respond to those requests (including business rules for automating them), and the maintaining a service catalog.
There’s also a knowledge base. What’s missing is “basic” or “low-level” monitoring and management of IT. This is fine: that’s not what the stack is for. Indeed, that’s a chance for partnering, both ways.
Partnering
In that respect, partnering with other companies and projects is right up Service-now.com’s alley (in my opinion). Indeed, that chance to partner to create a “suite” is what sent me off on the open platform spree yesterday.
Help desks and asset management can sometimes seem like after thoughts in some of the IT management products I look at. It’s no wonder: most people’s bread-and-butter are monitoring and management. In my mind, Service-now.com looks like a tasty service to partner with if you’re looking for a more robust help desk and CMDB-driven functions.
Even systems that have similar offering might benefit from having an “upgrade path” for users who’ve outgrown that platforms functionality and want a more enterprisey help desk and asset management. That is, it might be a good answer to customers who want “more” than what you have to offer but don’t want to leave you.<
More Notes
Here are some notes on the briefing:
As you’d expect with a help desk, much of the human-software interaction is oriented around task and workflow management
The documentation for Service-now.com is done in a wiki (I wonder what Anne Gentle would think if it). Even more exciting, they have several screencasts for demos and training (though I couldn’t find a page listing all of them).
From the sounds of it, there’s a platform nature to Service-now.com. Indeed, as I understand it, there are SOAP interfaces for everything. Also:
In the category of “Very Interesting”, the business rules section uses JavaScript as the language.
Service-now.com walks the line between “stripped down” and “too much,” but occasionally falls onto the “too much” which is usually unavoidable with standardized process. More importantly, what’s “too much” is a matter of perspective. Comparing it to SpiceWorks‘ asset management and ticketing would be interesting.
I like the way Service-now.com has “implemented” ITIL. It does a good job of walking that thin line.
While Service-now.com runs as a hosted application, if you really need it, they’ll set you up with an instance behind your firewall.