ServiceNow Simplified

HAM stands for Hardware Asset Management. It is a sub-module of ITAM. The main purpose of HAM is to track a piece of hardware (laptop, computer etc.) throughout its entire lifecycle from procurement to retirement. The main reason for this tracking is to maximize return on investment. What does tracking mean? Tracking can involve things like, making sure that a leased piece of hardware is returned to the vendor on the due date because getting late, even by one day can give the leaser, the right to extend the lease at any price of his choice, costing the company, a lot of money. Tracking can also include making sure that a piece of hardware is retired as soon as its warranty ends because hardware failure would not only include repair/replacement cost for the company but could also cause huge data losses etc. In short, HAM is there to make sure that you're getting your money's worth. What is the difference between HAM and HAM Pro? HAM Pro is AI powered, supports mobile tools and s...

ITAM stands for IT Asset Management. So, what are IT assets? These can be anything from laptops, desktops, iPads, iPhones, tablets, smartwatches etc. along with any and all software that is installed on them. So, what does ITAM do? The main job of ITAM is to make sure that these assets are being used in the most efficient manner with respect to finance. This simply means that a company has spent money to acquire these assets. ITAM is there to make sure that none of this money is being wasted by acquiring more assets than was necessary. This might sound simple enough in a small company with a few dozen employees but in a company with thousands of employees, it can be a big challenge to determine how much IT assets are required to run the company efficiently. This is important because acquiring too many assets would mean, using too many funds to acquire them. Money, that could have been used in some other project to maximize company revenue. ITAM has two main sub-modules: - 1. HAM & ...

 As we discussed during the Change Management module, Change Management is where you work out whether a change is necessary, feasible, what problems might occur if the change is made, how to circumvent those problems, what would be the cost of making the change etc. Based on this information and analysis, the change is either approved or dismissed during the Change Management stage.  So, if a change is approved during the change management stage, the change is actually executed in the Release Management stage.  To summarize: - Change Management is all about analyzing whether a change would be good or not. Release Management is where you actually execute that change.

We know that ServiceNow is all about providing services. These services can be printer repair, software update, hardware repair and maintenance etc. SLM (Service Level Management) is there to make sure that the quality of service being provided is good. And what is a "good" service. How do we even know what a "good" service is? Well, in the SLM, the service providers and the people who demand the services, negotiate with each other and come to an agreement about what makes a service, "good". This could cover things like percentage of the time the service is available, response time, how long it takes to solve the problem, speed and efficiency of the service etc. In summary, SLM is there to make sure that the services that are being provided are good and that the people demanding these services are satisfied.

CMDB stands for Configuration Management Database. It's a set of tables within the whole ServiceNow database that record data about all of the IT assets that a company has. It contains data about servers, printers, scanners and any other IT related devices that might be on a company's network. For each device, it typically contains data like: - 1. Device ID 2. Device type (server, workstation, laptop etc) 3. Status (in production, or in development) 4. owner (IT operations team, HR team etc) 5. Location (server room, rack 1 etc) 6. IP address,  7. Related CIs (this contains a list of all other devices that this device is connected to. This could be a web app server, database server, a router, load balancer etc) 8. Last updated (the date on which this machine was last updated),  9. Operating System (Windows, Linux etc) 10. Software Installed (Apache HTTP Server, Tomcat etc) And there can be other columns depending upon the type of devices. For e.g. in hospitals, special devices...

Request Fulfillment provides a Service Catalog to the end users to choose their desired service from. You can think of Service Catalog as a sort of a list of services that are on offer. The end user can select the service that they need. For example, the list could look like this: - 1. New laptop request 2. Software installation request 3. Access request to an application 4. Password reset request And there can be others. The end user would simply select the request that they need and the "process" to fulfill that request would begin from there. That "process" is called request fulfillment (duh!!)

Knowledge Management is sort of like a database of knowledge. It contains helpful information that users around a company can search and use to solve their own problems instead of calling the IT staff over and over again. For example, let's say, in a hospital, a doctor has just got a new iPad, and they can't figure out how to look up a patient's record using it. So instead of calling the IT staff for help right away, they can instead jump into the Knowledge Management module which might contain an article written by the IT staff, titled "How to pull up client records on the new iPad". Now the doctor can read the article and figure out to pull up patient data without creating a ticket and engaging the IT staff. So, at its core, Knowledge Management helps the end users solve their own problems by referring to relevant information without engaging the IT staff. Sounds a bit like Google, doesn't it? When you run into a problem, just run a search in Knowledge Manag...

Change Management, as the name suggests, is managing change in a manner, where nothing breaks because of a change that you've made or need to make. Let's say, you've got a server machine running Windows Server 2012. We know that Microsoft has ended support for this version of server. To keep your network secure, you decide to upgrade your system to a later version of Windows Server, let's say, Windows Server 2025. Now this is a "change" in the system. You're essentially changing the operating system from server 2012 to server 2025 and all sorts of problems can occur. Maybe the software that were running on server 2012 isn't compatible with server 2025 and might become buggy or unstable or might refuse to work altogether. Change Management is where you plan ahead, determine the feasibility of the change, make sure that the change is necessary, and find ways to circumvent potential problems so that the overall system keeps on running even after the chang...

 As discussed before, in a company with, let's say, 10,000 people, everyone has some sort of devices that they need to do their jobs. These could be printers, computers, laptops, iPads etc. And these devices can have all sorts of problems from software problems to hardware problems. As discussed before, Incident management was about solving the problem as quickly as possible and getting the system up and running without diving deeper and finding the root cause of the problem. Problem Management is where we dive deep into the problem, identify the root cause of the problem, i.e. we try to find out, why the problem occurred, so that we can solve that root cause and thus, prevent the problem from happening again. To summarize, incident management is where the main goal is to get the broken system up and running without taking a deep dive into the problem and finding its root-cause. Problem management is where we do the root-cause analysis to find the root cause of the problem so that ...