Dear Santa

[Bradley Ross]

[I shared the following letter with my ServiceNow account team just before Christmas 2013.]

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!

[Steven_Taylor]

Great feedback and props for making the first post!