[msy]

Workday, Palantir, ServiceNow - a new generation of Accenture/Oracle et al 'consulting' parasites that wine and dine their way into organisations (and governments) and then bleed them dry. There's a reason software spending endlessly goes up but productivity has flatlined.

[basket_horse]

These companies exist because non-tech companies building in-house software for their complex workflows also tend to run millions over budget and create brittle, bespoke software.

Also, I wouldn’t put Palantir in the same bucket as Workday and ServiceNow. It’s expensive, but it does work.

[msy]

So now 'professional management' bring in these firms and instead run hundreds of millions over budget to create brittle, bespoke software. It's profoundly damning on our industry that decades of software development later most productivity gains stopped at about the point Excel and email became widespread. Software has eaten the world('s budgets) with little to show for it. No wonder all these parasites are so excited about AI, another whease to flog to naive orgnaisations that will inevitably spiral in cost, deliver nothing of value and suck more budget from anything useful. Then sell them 'cybersecurity' and 'observability' on top because now their security is Swiss cheese.

[basket_horse]

I empathize with you, but it’s also worth saying that not all firms are the same. Just as not all in-house teams are the same. There are good ones and bad ones. Even inside firms there are good teams and bad teams. Enterprise software is complex and good software engineers are expensive. These projects are delayed and go over budget because their complexities are grossly underestimated.

[rwmj]

ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it? Is there no product demo at all during the purchase process? Do the sales people actively hide it or something?

[rgovostes]

I work in a department that has been using ServiceNow for at least 5 years, and I still do not know how to look up a ticket by ticket number. I just pretend I'm following along when my colleagues reference a ticket.

I just spent a minute poking at it: my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding. (Edit: it took 48 seconds to load the ticket.)

They also have a little stopwatch button on some pages that pops up a "Browser Response Time" window that tries to put the blame for slow page load times on the user's browser. Weird, wonder why they need that...

[rwmj]

Yes! It always amazes me there seems to be no obvious URL scheme for servicenow.sadcompany.com/<ticket-number> Like, did the developers forget to implement that?

[rgovostes]

Yeah, and there's no search field, either. Surely, this is my misunderstanding and I should click the "Show Help" icon for a product tutorial, right? This pops up a window saying:

> Now Assist offers real-time guidance and support for users seeking help with Virtual Agent. This feature’s generative AI skills blah blah blah

Ok...? There is no input box to interact with "Now Assist" or the "Virtual Agent", it's just like a marketing blurb for some other feature.

[dwood_dev]

F500, we have a pretty custom ServiceNow, but all I do is put the ticket or any other identifier in the search box and go. Takes 2 seconds to be in the ticket. Granted, that interface sucks too, but I suspect your main problem is internal to your org and the people that configured your ServiceNow.

[janstice]

Your system was configured by muppets if you don’t have a search box - it’s a massive beast that like all enterprise-grade software is a toolbox for you to bend to your will, but the downside is that if your configuration people don’t have empathy for the users (and looking at you especially, contract architects) you end up with a system that is optimised for whoever talks with the vendor, and not for anyone else.

[T0Bi]

What? Unless someone actively removed the search field, you should have quite a big search field in the top right corner, where you can basically search for anything you'd need.

[andreasha]

This works https://company.service-now.com/task.do?sysparm_query=number...

[heyheyhey]

> my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding.

Like all SaaS in-house implementations, this is entirely on how your company's ServiceNow developers.

I've worked on multiple SNOW implementations and things can go really bad when you go crazy with the customizations.

[rgovostes]

Your comment makes me understand the product even less. So it’s SaaS where you have to develop it yourself? What exactly is the company providing? Why do its customers simultaneously want to outsource this to a vendor and then spend resources customizing it down to the level of “basic CRUD operations work” and “the user sees a search field”?

[inkyoto]

ServiceNow is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS), not a SaaS, that allows development of new products on top of it.

At its core, there is a workflow management engine that third parties can use to implement their own, stateful, process centric products and services.

We have ServiceNow proper (the CRM) and a completely unrelated to CRM third party product that we have purchased and which is implemented on the ServiceNow platform. Both have nothing to do with each other and are used by different business users.

[heyheyhey]

You don't develop it, you develop on it. SN provides the underlying software, implementations, hosting, upgrades, etc. Salesforce is another example of this.

[T0Bi]

Not to say that ServiceNow is great, but not being able to type the number into the search bar (top right) sounds more like a user issue than anything else.

[FireBeyond]

I love that ServiceNow has completely broken the back/forward behavior in its own unique way.

Yes, many other sites also break this navigation, but SN takes it to a whole other level.

Want to open and edit multiple records in different tabs? You're a braver soul than I. Better also double check what record you go back to when you click Update. Which is of course different to when you right click and choose Save.

What comes after UI16 for user interface design? Well, UIB, of course. UI16 still looks straight out of 2016.

[fluidcruft]

We have something called ServiceNow where I work. It's so horrible that I assumed it was in house.

[drjasonharrison]

I, too, made this assumption. Then I learned it was an actual product my ex-employer had selected and kept using.

It still didn't make sense why an enhancement request and a fix request couldn't be moved between queues. Or why I received three (at least) emails when an issue was closed.

[skissane]

> ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it?

When I first saw ServiceNow, I was impressed - because my point of comparison (I worked for a university at the time) was BMC Remedy, which was terrible. And some years later I did some consulting for a major bank which was using some 3270-based IBM solution (Tivoli something… I believe it has finally been discontinued) and ServiceNow is light years ahead of that too.