{"id":574,"date":"2007-01-17T17:10:31","date_gmt":"2007-01-17T23:10:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/2007\/01\/17\/service-nowcom-briefing-itil-saas\/"},"modified":"2007-01-17T17:10:31","modified_gmt":"2007-01-17T23:10:31","slug":"service-nowcom-briefing-itil-saas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/2007\/01\/17\/service-nowcom-briefing-itil-saas\/","title":{"rendered":"Service-now.com Briefing: ITIL SaaS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"pic\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/cote\/361012862\/\" title=\"Photo Sharing\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm1.static.flickr.com\/158\/361012862_a7b696388a.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"351\" alt=\"Service-now.com\/demo\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Last week <a href=\"http:\/\/www.monkchips.com\">James<\/a> and I talked with Fred Luddy and Robert McNeill from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.service-now.com\">Service-now.com<\/a>. 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&#8217;re pretty sharply aligned with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/2007\/01\/12\/dissecting-systems-management-with-itil\/\">the ITIL ideas<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The help desk tracks incidents and problems, along with the work-flow for IT folks to actually do something with those &#8220;trouble tickets.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>The CMDB tracks all of the things IT pays attention to at an &#8220;asset management&#8221; 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 ;&gt;<\/li>\n<li>The asset\/change management stack is a collection of <a href=\"http:\/\/training.service-now.com\/SelfService\/SelfService.html\">self-service<\/a> 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There&#8217;s also <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.service-now.com\/index.php?title=Knowledge_Base\">a knowledge base<\/a>. What&#8217;s missing is &#8220;basic&#8221; or &#8220;low-level&#8221; monitoring and management of IT. This is fine: that&#8217;s not what the stack is for. Indeed, that&#8217;s a chance for partnering, both ways.<\/p>\n<h2>Partnering<\/h2>\n<p>In that respect, partnering with other companies and projects is right up Service-now.com&#8217;s alley (in my opinion). Indeed, that chance to partner to create a &#8220;suite&#8221; is what sent me off on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/2007\/01\/16\/open-platforms-in-systems-management\/\">open platform spree yesterday<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Help desks and asset management can sometimes seem like after thoughts in some of the IT management products I look at. It&#8217;s no wonder: most people&#8217;s bread-and-butter are monitoring and management. In my mind, Service-now.com looks like a tasty service to partner with if you&#8217;re looking for a more robust help desk and CMDB-driven functions.<\/p>\n<p>Even systems that have similar offering might benefit from having an &#8220;upgrade path&#8221; for users who&#8217;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 &#8220;more&#8221; than what you have to offer but don&#8217;t want to leave you.&lt; <\/p>\n<h2>More Notes<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<p>Here are some notes on the briefing:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>As you&#8217;d expect with a help desk, much of the human-software interaction is oriented around task and workflow management<\/li>\n<li>The documentation for Service-now.com is done in <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.service-now.com\/index.php?title=Main_Page\">a wiki<\/a> (I wonder what <a href=\"http:\/\/talk.bmc.com\/blogs\/blog-gentle\/anne-gentle\/wiki-tech-doc\">Anne Gentle would think if it<\/a>). Even more exciting, they have several screencasts for demos and training (though I couldn&#8217;t find a page listing all of them).<\/li>\n<li>From the sounds of it, there&#8217;s a platform nature to Service-now.com. Indeed, as I understand it, there are SOAP interfaces for everything. Also:<\/li>\n<li>In the category of &#8220;Very Interesting&#8221;, the business rules section uses JavaScript as the language.<\/li>\n<li>Service-now.com walks the line between &#8220;stripped down&#8221; and &#8220;too much,&#8221; but occasionally falls onto the &#8220;too much&#8221; which is usually unavoidable with standardized process. More importantly, what&#8217;s &#8220;too much&#8221; is a matter of perspective. Comparing it to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/2007\/01\/15\/help-your-community-help-you-an-example-from-spiceworks\/\">SpiceWorks<\/a>&#8216; asset management and ticketing would be interesting.<\/li>\n<li>I like the way Service-now.com has &#8220;implemented&#8221; ITIL. It does a good job of walking that thin line.<\/li>\n<li>While Service-now.com runs as a hosted application, if you really need it, they&#8217;ll set you up with an instance behind your firewall.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here&#8217;s my raw mind-map notes:<\/p>\n<p class=\"pic\">\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/cote-media.redmonk.com\/cote\/files\/2012\/06\/20070110-service-now.com-2.pdf\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/cote-media.redmonk.com\/cote\/files\/2012\/06\/20070110-service-now.com-2-tm.jpg\" height=\"305\" width=\"498\" border=\"1\" hspace=\"4\" vspace=\"4\" alt=\"20070110-Service-Now.Com-2\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><b>Disclaimer:<\/b> SpiceWorks is a client.<\/p>\n<p><!-- technorati tags start --><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align:right;font-size:10px\">Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/assetmgmt\" rel=\"tag\">assetmgmt<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/briefings\" rel=\"tag\">briefings<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/cmdb\" rel=\"tag\">cmdb<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/helpdesk\" rel=\"tag\">helpdesk<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/hosted\" rel=\"tag\">hosted<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/itil\" rel=\"tag\">itil<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/javascript\" rel=\"tag\">javascript<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/openplatform\" rel=\"tag\">openplatform<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/platform\" rel=\"tag\">platform<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/redmonkadvice\" rel=\"tag\">redmonkadvice<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/saas\" rel=\"tag\">saas<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/sla\" rel=\"tag\">sla<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/soap\" rel=\"tag\">soap<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/wiki\" rel=\"tag\">wiki<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!-- technorati tags end --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Briefing note on Service-desk.com: help desk, asset management, and change management.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-systems-management"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}