Service-now.com, from its inception in 2004, uses the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)  as a development design document to define applications such as incident, problem, change, release and configuration management as well as a number of extension processes including service request and fulfillment, knowledge management and service level management.

ITIL is an integrated, process-based, best practice framework for delivering and managing IT services. Originally initiated to improve IT service management for the UK central government, it has become relevant to all organizations; public or private sector, large or small, centralized or distributed.  Service-now.com provides a basis for automating these processes using a single, simple and flexible toolset.

Recently, the Society of IT Management announced that Service-now.com customer "The Central Office of Information (part of the UK government), is more advanced than any other public sector group in meeting ITIL 3 guidelines”. Marc Guy, service delivery manager, for the COI, squarely attributes much of the success to Service-now.com. He has gone on to win The ITSMF Service Management Champion of the year for 2007.

“The solution has made our internal service much more efficient, look more professional and has helped us to drive our ITIL processes forward. Now we finally have a tool that will make ITIL adoption so much easier!”  
- Marc Guy, Central Office of Information, UK Government (UK itSMF Service Management Champion of Year 2007)

Integrating ITIL processes empowers service management with the following benefits:

Incident Management

Service-now.com provides an ITIL based Incident Management application to pro-actively manage the resolution of incidents affecting the availability or usability of  people, processes and CIs. Incident Management manages the complete lifecycle of an Incident from initial creation through prioritization, categorization, assignment, escalation and resolution. Incidents can be created manually by the Service Desk staff receiving reported issues or automatically via email, web submissions or through events monitored by third party systems management solutions.

Problem Management

Service-now.com provides an ITIL based Problem Management application to manage the resolution of the root cause of a problem affecting multiple users or systems. Problems can be created independently or directly from an Incident and multiple incidents can be attributed to one problem. As with Incident Management, problems can be categorized, assigned and managed via SLAs. When the Problem is closed, workflow drives the closure and subsequent notification of all associated Incidents.

Change Management

Service-now.com provides an ITIL based Change Management application designed to pro-actively manage the installations, moves, adds and changes of CIs. The goal of the change management process is to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for the efficient and prompt handling of all changes. This allows the IT organization to control the flow of changes and minimize the impact of change-related incidents upon service quality, consequently improving the day-to-day operations of the IT organization.

Release Management

Release Management helps reduce the risk of implementation of IT environmental changes to hardware and software. Service-now.com helps implement your Release Management discipline by providing on-demand capabilities for planning, building, approving, and deploying releases of hardware and/or software.

Industry best practices are part of the delivered product but the ability to modify the business rules and workflow is so simple that users quickly design, refine and redesign their processes in response to their changing business needs.