Dear Santa (2022)

[Bradley Ross]

Dear Santa,

You know I love the ServiceNow platform and I use it all the time in my work. Just between you and me, I think the product teams in headquarters sometimes focus on shiny new stuff and ignore the old standbys so many of their customers still rely on every day. Maybe this year for Christmas, your elves can make the new year a little brighter for all the users of the tool, regardless of which products on the platform they are using. Santa, I hope our friends at ServiceNow won’t wait until the entire user interface is rewritten to make usability improvements to the old interfaces that we still use all the time. For some reason, ideas like these get ignored in the idea portal, but they can’t ignore Father Christmas himself!

• List views. I look enviously at other kids with their fancy new SaaS applications that have list views where the kids can resize the width of the columns, drag around column headers to change the order the columns appear, and drag a column heading to the top of the list area to group the list by that column. We need this functionality on the list views that are pervasive throughout the platform, not just on a handful of new UI interfaces.
• Reports with multiple levels of indentation grouping. We always been able to do a single level of grouping on reports. As our data grows, it is quite common to need two or more levels of grouping where I can collapse any level of the view. Furthermore, when displaying a group, it is very helpful to have the groupings indented below their parent. For some reason, the feature that is common on other platforms is missing in ServiceNow!
• View-only mode for reports. Santa, why are reports in edit mode every time you look at them? I don’t need a dashboard with multiple reports. I just want to view a single report. I could send a link to that report to a coworker. And every time they look at that report, they are in edit mode for the report. This behavior is baffling. Most of the time I’m viewing a report, I don’t need to edit it. I think ServiceNow expects us to put a report on a dashboard, but that has drawbacks compared to viewing the report directly. Please, Santa, help us get a view-only mode for reports and make that the default view for a report—even for people with rights to edit the report.
• Reports with calculated fields. Sure, there can be a few pre-defined calculation fields on a table that can be used in reports. But when I’m running ad hoc reports, I want to be able to see simple calculations for each row, or do simple calculations using values from various columns. This functionality exists in the platform, but it is inexplicably locked away from regular report creators across my organization. Most report creators must resort to exporting to Excel to get their work done—on a stale copy of the data. We can do better in-platform so people have fewer times they need to take the data out of the platform!! If one of the elves tries to tell you that Performance Analytics is the solution to this problem, don’t let them fool you. This isn’t advanced reporting functionality. It is table stakes! And I’m saying that as a customer with access to Performance Analytics who is a big fan of the tool.
• Flexible Date/Time Entry. When I go to fill in a due date field, wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could type in “three days” or “one week” and ServiceNow would apply some AI smarts to it and put in a valid date/time? The format required to type in a date and time is exceedingly painful when typing and a zillion clicks if using a mouse. I’m pretty fast at typing regular words, so please let me use natural language more often in the platform, starting with date fields. I confess Santa, that this has been on my list since my last letter to you almost a decade ago. Whether it is using natural language words or some other UI improvement, we have to make it nicer to work with date and time fields for users.

Thanks, Santa, for all you do! I can’t wait until Christmas!

[Jace Benson]

I love this post.  I tried to get to you past link but I get a "The content you requested cannot be displayed right now. It may be temporarily unavailable, the link you clicked on may have expired, or you may not have permission to view this page." error.  Is the post gone?

[Bradley Ross]

It could be that not everyone has access to the community where it was posted. Here is the text of the letter from 2013:

Dear Santa

I'm a longtime ServiceNow customer and I've really loved their tools. However, I've noticed some opportunities for improvement. I know you have pretty awesome coding skills and a great army of elves, so I'm hoping you can make a magic Christmas for me by delivering the following enhancements.

1. Improve Search. The search algorithm in ServiceNow for the KB is naí¯ve and the tuning is primitive. Everything is based on the number of times a word occurs. This was good enough for Alta Vista in 1997, but then Google came along and changed the game completely. Enterprise IT users expect more from search than they did ten years ago. Sure, we can try to work around the problems by creating a totally custom service catalog for people to browse, but the simple fact is that users prefer to search. Santa, if you can't change the way that the core search engine works in ServiceNow, maybe you can make it possible for me to put my existing SharePoint search server in front of ServiceNow in a way that will respect all the permissions in ServiceNow.
2. De-Uglify. I know this is going to sound a little silly, Santa, because we both know that beauty is more than skin deep. But I'm finding it challenging to get some of the users in my organization past the first date with ServiceNow because the user interface for IT workers is… Well, let's just say it has "inner beauty." We used to have to rely on desktop applications to provide beautiful interfaces and great keyboard control because the web was too slow and browsers were too limited. Those days are gone, but the ServiceNow interface hasn't caught up. Just a little lipstick might go a long way. I was sort of hoping that the interface improvements for the tablets and phones would work their way back up to the regular web client, but that hasn't panned out yet. As long as you don't assign the elves who make the ugly sweaters to this project, I'm sure you can come up with something wonderful.
3. Flexible Date/Time Formats. Editable date/time fields are all over the place in ServiceNow. The little icon that opens a date/time picker is tedious to use and requires a lot of mousing and clicking. Heavy users really need something better. I wish that ServiceNow would let me enter dates in any format I like (as Microsoft Excel does) and automatically convert them to a standard format. Can we make that a little easier on everyone? This is so pervasive throughout the system that customizing it myself would be a big pain. Won't you do all the hard work for me, Santa?
4. Application/Platform Version Isolation. Too many of my applications built on ServiceNow are simultaneously affected by every platform update. Wouldn't it be cool if I could isolate my Incident tool, update it, test it, and deploy the update all without affecting the Change tool? Instead, I have to upgrade everything on dev simultaneously and coordinate a large scale testing project with all my groups of users at the same time. Santa, I realize I'm asking you to bend the rules that govern space and time. The platform is the bottom of the stack and everything else is resting on it. You can't update part of the platform without affecting everything above it in the stack! I realize it is hard. But you make reindeer fly through the sky and visit every house in a single night. I'm sure that you and your elves can find a solution to this problem that is as innovative as ServiceNow's original patching solution has been.
5. Simple Licensing Model. ServiceNow used to have a simple license model. Now they don't. I long for the old days, but I understand some of the limits of the old license model. One big one was the fact that occasional process users pay the same price as heavy process users. This makes it harder to convince me to add new, low-volume users to the system because I can see what a poor value that is compared to my high-volume users. Run some "cost-per-task-created" numbers based on the current license costs and you'll see what I mean. Scary. Please, Santa, dig in your bag of tricks and find a billing model that makes my life easier and that makes it easy for me to use ServiceNow in interesting new ways. Perhaps they could bill me based on traffic to and from my production instance, or for the space used, or for the pages loaded. Why do I have to spend extra time trying to sort and classify my users into different license categories to get the best bang for my licensing buck? Make it easy for me to increase my usage of the tool. Make the billing model transparent, simple, and fair. ServiceNow doesn't have that today, but I'm sure you can come up with something clever that partakes of the licensing ethos upon which the company was founded.

Santa, even if you can't get all these fixes in time for this Christmas, I hope you'll hold on to my list for next Christmas. Thanks!