News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on ServiceNow acquires Lightstep. Parent comment

Re:ServiceNow acquires Lightstep by throwaway894345 on Monday May 10, 2021 @01:39PM (#27108644)
Agreed. This is a particularly petty grievance but it boggles the mind that the landing page for ordinary users is some backend ticket management view and the thing users want is the cushy ticket requesting page with the view of their active tickets and so on which is unfortunately buried behind some unmemorable path and which is not linked to from the obscenely noisy landing page (or any of its network of pages that most users don't care about at all). If you're smart, you create a bookmark and move on with life, but I keep treating it like it's the last time I'll need that stupid link and of course that's entirely my fault. But still, designing software that requires individual users to manage bookmarks is insane.

So yeah, that was my petty grievance--no doubt I or the administrators could make this more pleasant. But I've never heard a single soul have anything favorable to say about SNOW. I don't know if SNOW's success is attributable to an unusually impoverished competitive landscape or if there are hidden factors (it appeals to IT's innate enmity toward the rest of the organization?), but it is surprising that SNOW survives at all.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:ServiceNow acquires Lightstep by haswell on Monday May 10, 2021 @02:17PM (#27109076)
Having worked at a company with a ServiceNow implementation, I think I'd summarize my experience as: ServiceNow can be transformative when implemented by a competent team, or utterly useless when not managed well or left as-is upon deployment.

Orgs get in trouble by trying to solve internal process inefficiencies and related people problems by throwing ServiceNow at it. The "digital" version of a shitty process is still a shitty process.

> But I've never heard a single soul have anything favorable to say about SNOW

I've been to the conferences, and there are plenty of folks who love the technology stack, and can do powerful things with it. But I suspect that most people experience the product as an end-user, and that experience is 100% dependent on the team that owns/implements the platform. There's a big difference between "We have a center of excellence for automating manual processes, and ServiceNow is part of that solution" and "We brought ServiceNow in to solve world hunger" .... ("is this thing on??...")

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:ServiceNow acquires Lightstep by ec109685 on Monday May 10, 2021 @09:15PM (#27113010)
Are there any good write ups out there where ServiceNow is really nailing it for a company? Genuinely curious.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:ServiceNow acquires Lightstep by throwaway894345 on Monday May 10, 2021 @02:27PM (#27109211)
Reminds me of SharePoint. Some people swear by it, but my impression is that it's something that incompetent managers buy and then have to shell out later for "SharePoint consultants" to come in and actually make it useful for your organization (and whether or not it is useful depends on the quality of said consultants) and the best you can hope for is a solution that is 80% as nice (from a user perspective, not an IT perspective) and 2000+% the cost of GSuite.
[ Parent | on HN ]