ServiceNow’s IT Service Management (ITSM) product leads the pack in delivering exceptional digital service experiences. But which package is right for your needs? And is it worth making the jump to ITSM Pro?
Today’s market demands the delivery of fast, personal services at scale – alongside the flexibility and agility to adapt to quickly changing needs and expectations.
With over 20 years in the IT service management sector, ServiceNow’s ITSM offering has become the gold standard for achieving this.
But the ITSM product has also gone through its own evolution, resulting in not one, not two, but three different iterations being made available for organisations to make use of, depending on their size and need.
On the surface, it can be difficult to know whether ITSM Standard will be enough or if you really need the additional elements that come with ITSM Pro.
In this blog, we’ll explore the differences between ITSM and ITSM Pro, helping you identify which will best meet your needs and support you in delivering the stellar IT service your users expect.
ITSM Standard explained
ServiceNow’s core ITSM product is a strong ‘starter pack’ for most organisations looking to transform the way they deliver IT services. If you’re aiming to use automation to speed up everyday work and deliver intelligent, responsive IT services, ITSM will help you do just that.
It contains everything needed to help your IT teams access complete and relevant data to solve problems and make strategic decisions whilst enabling employees to get answers to common questions without bogging down your Service Desk.
As part of ITSM Standard, you’ll get access to the following:
- Incident Management
- Problem Management
- Change Management
- Request Management
- Asset and Cost Management
- Walk-up Experience
- Service Operations Workspace
- Now Mobile
- Mobile Agent
- Knowledge Management
- Configuration Management
- Reporting
- Service Level Management
- Benchmarks
- Surveys and Assessments
- Virtual Agent Lite
- Agent Chat
- Digital Portfolio Management
All of the above will serve you well in gaining control over your IT, applying better processes, and modernising your internal and external IT experiences.
The Incident, Problem, Change and Request Management components are key to establishing effective workflows to gain control of your service management processes – typically reducing the time taken to resolve a major incident by up to 60%.
With those in place, Configuration Management will help you create and build out your CMDB to better manage service health, understand service consumption patterns and calculate the cost of services.
Deploying the Service Operations Workspace and Mobile Agent app will make it easier for your agents to get work done faster, regardless of wherever they are.
You can then provide a more efficient face-to-face support experience with the Walk-up Experience and pool lessons learned with Knowledge Management to provide insights that will accelerate the remediation of future incidents.
ServiceNow ITSM Pro explained
So, with all of that in place, why might you want to opt for ITSM Pro?
As the digital service space grows more competitive, the need for smarter, more efficient services becomes a key differentiator in the market. ServiceNow created ITSM Pro to meet the needs of those organisations looking to innovate and take advantage of the very latest machine learning, AI and automation capabilities.
With intelligent chat bots and enhanced analytics, you can elevate your service experience, boost productivity, resolve incidents quicker and even predict and prevent issues before they occur.
As part of ITSM Pro, you’ll get everything included in Standard as well as:
- DevOps: Rapidly increase development time and innovate in-house to increase the security, stability and speed of service delivery.
- Predictive Intelligence: A layer of AI that powers features and capabilities across ServiceNow to provide better work experiences.
- Dynamic Translation: Automatically translate both virtual chatbot and live agent conversations into 16 different languages.
- Performance Analytics: Create management dashboards, report on KPIs and deep dive into your performance metrics to increase quality and optimise service delivery costs.
- Continual Improvement Management: Identify opportunities for improvement and implement project phases and tasks to achieve them. Then track your progress and accurately measure success.
- Virtual Agent: Use intelligent AI to address user issues in the first instance. The Pro version features the ability to create new topics and custom controls and uses Natural Language Understanding (NLU) vs. simply identifying keywords.
- Service Owner Workspace: Used by portfolio managers or service owners to view and manage services in a single centralised location.
- Vendor Manager Workspace: Track the performance of your vendors and manage all of the related information in one place to assess their value and impact.
As you can see, the focus is very much on enhancing the foundation laid in ITSM. ITSM Pro gives you much richer data analytics and AI enhancements as well as new workspaces to take a more strategic, higher-level view of how your services are performing.
Benefits of ITSM Pro
If you’re looking to truly transform your IT services – and your management of them – then ITSM Pro offers some key benefits:
Make sense of excessive data
With IT assets producing more data than you can manually process, ITSM Pro offers some effective solutions for cutting through the noise and making sense of the information coming out of your environment.
Sorting, categorising and analysing data has historically been a laborious and resource-intensive task. Using Predictive Intelligence, you can do this much quicker and remove the repetitive tasks that typically bog down your IT teams.
That frees you and your team up to focus on bigger, more strategic opportunities for growth. It also gives you rich insights that can be used by Virtual Agent to provide a better level of service, much faster.
Transform your business today with ServiceNow ITSM.
Book a free consultationWorkflow efficiency
Your response workflows need to be seamless if they’re to deliver on the modern expectations of your customers.
From ticket assignment through to resolution, the experience needs to be both speedy and smooth.
If your workflows are being bogged down by inefficient task assignments or poor prioritisation, you’re going to suffer from lengthy response/resolution times and an increasing error rate.
ITSM Pro intelligently prioritises tasks by leveraging powerful automation abilities that span the entire platform and applications within it. Its built-in machine learning helps you improve service delivery over time by learning from errors or mistakes to automatically suggest better solutions to common problems.
Using this experience, Predictive Intelligence can then categorise and assign tickets to the appropriate teams or individuals accompanied by suggested remediation actions that can be enabled in a single click – dramatically increasing the speed and quality of your services.
According to ServiceNow, organisations using ITSM Pro have seen machine learning and AI help them tackle 20% more incidents in the same time frame.
Intelligent analytics
Imagine having access to real-time visibility across your entire organisation at an operational, strategic, and individual level. Well, that’s exactly what ITSM Pro gives you with Performance Analytics.
Presented in easy-to-understand dashboards, time charts and scorecards, ITSM Pro pulls together your data and shapes it into a form that helps you make smarter decisions.
That insight is invaluable when it comes to creating KPIs and measuring the actual impact and performance of your IT services and mapping it back to your overall business objectives.
It also helps you identify areas that can be optimised or need further attention – ensuring you can keep improving and innovating on how your organisation delivers value.
ITSM Pro licensing
ServiceNow doesn’t list a specific per-user or overall cost for each of its ITSM packages.
The final cost will be influenced by several factors, including the size of your organisation, any additional work required for implementation, as well as integrating it with any existing ServiceNow licensing or products you already have in place.
The best way to find out what it could potentially cost you is to reach out to a ServiceNow Partner, such as ourselves, to accurately assess which tier is best for you and what you’ll need for a successful implementation.
ITSM Pro vs. ITSM Enterprise
As we mentioned at the beginning of this blog, there’s also a third iteration of the ITSM package, ITSM Enterprise.
Ideally suited to, unsurprisingly, the very biggest and most complex IT environments, ITSM Enterprise contains everything from the Standard and Pro versions plus:
- Workforce Optimisation
- Process Optimisation
Workforce Optimisation provides team scheduling and performance reporting to help you track capacity and skill management across your organisation.
Process Optimisation allows you to visualise and deep dive into how your business processes are performing to determine root causes with AI-powered analysis.
Both of these products are intended for widescale analysis and optimisation at scale. Incredibly powerful – and essential for those operating at the enterprise level.
Selecting the right ITSM for you
Whilst it may seem confusing that there are different tiers to ServiceNow’s ITSM product, it’s intended to offer you the flexibility to choose a licensing level that suits your needs.
Not every organisation will want – or need – the enhancements on offer in ITSM Pro and Enterprise. But ITSM Pro is becoming an increasingly popular choice as the focus grows on delivering a much more integrated and seamless IT service experience.
Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of what each tier can provide and why you would use them. If you’d like to explore ITSM further, or simply make sure you’re getting the most out of your existing ITSM licensing, we’re happy to walk you through the options and demonstrate the benefits on offer.
Key takeaways
- ServiceNow’s ITSM offering comes in three tiers, Standard, Pro and Enterprise.
- ITSM Standard provides everything you need to deliver an exceptional IT service experience and create a strong foundation to build on.
- ITSM Pro provides everything included in Standard but brings greater machine learning and automation capabilities to the party.
- ITSM Enterprise offers additional components that allow you to analyse and optimise across every element of your IT service management at scale.
- There’s no hard and fast licensing for ITSM Pro, but this is done to make the licensing cost appropriate to your needs.
- Look to use the support of a ServiceNow Partner to help identify the best fit for your organisation.
Next steps
- Discover the top four benefits of combining ITSM with IT Operations Management.
- See where ITSM fits into the wider ServiceNow platform in our complete guide blog.
FlyForm is an elite ServiceNow partner, renowned for its expertise in integrating and optimising ServiceNow solutions for businesses. Leveraging their deep knowledge of the platform, FlyForm can tailor ServiceNow implementations to fit unique business requirements, ensuring a seamless digital transformation journey.
