CIO Strategy

TLDR: Higher education IT budget planning now includes a question that did not come up as often five years ago: what stops if this budget comes down fifteen percent. Most institutions answer it in a spreadsheet, at speed, in a meeting where the answer becomes a commitment. The spreadsheet version collapses on the second follow-up question, because it can show cost but cannot show what is mandated, what is committed, what depends on what, and what the deferral costs later. Thi

TLDR: Institutions have paid between $40,000 and $60,000 on a time-and-materials basis for a ServiceNow CMDB assessment and received a conclusion they already had, which is that the CMDB needs work. That is not an accident of effort. Findings that are specific enough to act on are findings specific enough to scope, and scoping is where a traditional partner loses the follow-on engagement. A CMDB assessment is only useful when it does three things: score the data against evide

TLDR: AI project intake in higher education is the missing piece on most campuses right now. Every unit has an idea, the ideas arrive through whatever channel the requester has access to, and the institution has no queue to put them in. The reflex is either to approve everything and govern later, or to freeze everything behind an AI policy that is still being drafted. Both produce the same outcome, which is ungoverned pilots that surface at renewal. The alternative is a short

TLDR: ServiceNow SPM higher education deployments fail for a reason that has nothing to do with the product. Enterprise portfolio guidance assumes a single intake path, a role-based resource pool, a rolling approval process, and a fiscal calendar that bends to the business. A campus has none of those things. Demand arrives through five front doors. Capacity is a handful of named people. The academic calendar is immovable. Approval runs through multiple governing bodies with d

TLDR: Most higher education ServiceNow instances drift after go-live. The instance you are running stops matching the platform you bought, and that gap has a name: platform debt. It is not a failed implementation. It is a balance you stopped servicing. This piece breaks down the six sources of platform debt, why higher education accrues it faster than almost anyone (four of the six causes are organizational, not technical), and how an Instance Health Assessment turns the prob

TLDR: Higher education AI vendor consolidation is the procurement conversation every R1 CIO is having in 2026 but few institutions have framed clearly. Every SaaS vendor in the higher ed software market has bolted an AI sidecar onto their existing functionality in the last 18 months. The institution ends up governing five to ten different AI sidecars across student, alumni, research, and administrative domains, each with its own data path, FERPA exposure, and contract renewal

ITSM modernization is not one project at most R1 institutions. It is three. The first is moving onto ServiceNow from a legacy ticketing system. The second is maturing within IT, which means consolidating service desks, unifying knowledge, completing the CMDB, and producing the metrics that IT leadership actually needs. The third is what happens after IT works. The move from ITSM-only to ITSM-plus, where Customer Service Management or HR Service Delivery joins the platform and