Your ITSM is critical to your business agility. It provides the best way for your IT teams to gather and resolve end-user issues across the organization. And that’s both the biggest benefit and, when it comes to ServiceNow, the biggest drawback. It’s only for your IT teams. Yet in modern businesses more than just IT teams are involved in building and supporting software for end-users, whether they are direct consumers or business partners.
If you’ve ever had issues with managing multiple platforms between your Dev and IT teams for building and supporting software, then you need to read on. If you’ve ever had issues with ServiceNow not being able to integrate with other critical systems, like Jira, then you need to read on. If you’ve ever felt like you are paying for a bloat of features you don’t need or use in ServiceNow, well, then…yeah, you get it.
There are four key reasons why you should consider migrating from ServiceNow to Atlassian JSM. Although there are others, these will have the most impact on your business.
Part of the issue with ServiceNow is a bloat of features you may not need or even want. ServiceNow seems to be designed for the world’s biggest, most complex enterprises. But those are few and far in between. In fact, most of the ServiceNow ITSM platform features aren’t applicable to the vast majority of organizations. But that doesn’t change the price.
You not only get the features whether you like them or not, you pay for them whether you like it or not. If that isn’t bad enough, it actually creates a much bigger issue for ServiceNow users: complexity. Menus upon menus with submenus enough to fill a 4K screen. Using the system can actually slow everything down, especially for users who aren’t familiar enough with it to know exactly where they need to go to access what they need.
The intentional complexity of ServiceNow reveals another big issue with it as an ITSM platform. It requires specialized skills to use and configure. That means you’ll need to hire people with the skills to use it, or pay money to train them (and hope they don’t leave for another job somewhere else). This reliance on a specialized set of skills to use ServiceNow ITSM functionality not only adds cost to your bottom line but it undermines productivity.
What if those people with specialized resources are on vacation? What if they get sick? Any disruption in their availability is disruption not only in resolving end-user issues (which can affect productivity in other ways, such as when they can’t log into a critical system) but also in development. Your Dev teams rely on a steady flow of information from ServiceNow that they can enter into their development management platforms like Jira (which is another issue; just wait). But if your ServiceNow folks are unavailable, development can be halted as well. Productivity goes down, customer or end-user satisfaction goes down, even revenue can go down.
ServiceNow has one flaw that is fatal to businesses trying to compete in today’s high-paced, 24/7/365 digital economy: complex interoperability. Even though ServiceNow is a modern, web-based application, integrating it with other mission-critical systems, like Jira, is complex. And that integration is a one-off. What if you need other integrations between your ITSM and business systems? Does ServiceNow offer an ecosystem of applications and provide a simple, almost one-click approach to integration?
ServiceNow is a walled garden, floating in the clouds, just out of the reach of your interoperability. And that creates major issues. Because unless ServiceNow has deemed a business system worthy of integration, you cannot connect it with other systems. The result? Your Dev and IT teams are going to create manual, kludgy workarounds. They need things to connect. They need data from ServiceNow flowing into other important platforms because connecting these systems allows your Dev teams to connect actual customer tickets and IT team service responses to features in the roadmap or bug fixes in the pipeline. Without that direct integration, those manual processes require more time and, ultimately, introduce the opportunities for errors which, in turn, can undermine efficiency as the wrong features get implemented before priority needs.
ServiceNow as an ITSM is targeted at one business group: IT. It often doesn’t meet the needs of other teams, like Dev, that need visibility into end-user support issues and service requests to align development priorities. As a result, Dev teams will often use a different tool, integrated with Jira, to capture end-user feedback. And that results in silos of data.
Collaboration between IT teams, who are the front-line to end-user requests, and Dev teams who build the systems end-users interact with, is critical to ensuring business agility. What could possibly slow down agility more than multiple systems performing the same basic function, in this case ITSM, used by different teams? Okay, maybe trying to play soccer in a hurricane, but this is a close second.
In our modern digital business world, you can’t afford to undermine efficiency, reduce productivity, or allow complexity and a lack of collaboration to hinder your agility. But if you are using ServiceNow as your ITSM, you are doing just that.
Maybe it’s time to think about the big “M” word. No, not monumental (although this is a monumental decision). Migration. That’s the “M” word that you need to start saying in the statement, “we need to migrate from ServiceNow to Atlassian JSM.”
Why? Because JSM will provide you the flexibility, collaboration and interoperability your business needs to ensure end-users are satisfied with systems and the features your Dev teams are rolling out. Imagine a single platform providing collaboration between Dev and IT Teams connected to a marketplace of over 5,000 apps for hassle-free integration to other mission-critical applications like Jira.
The “M” word can be scary but ServiceRocket is here to help. Our experienced consultants can walk you through a proven methodology to help you move from ServiceNow to Atlassian JSM. And, more importantly, we can help you do it on-time and on-budget. There’s no reason for you to remain shackled to an ITSM platform that is holding back your business.
Be brave. Become agile. Move beyond ServiceNow.
Rethink your ITSM. Learn how Atlassian JSM succeeds where ServiceNow falls short in our newest whitepaper.
