Platform Architecture

Faculty governance is not an obstacle to overcome. It is the institutional design choice that makes platform decisions durable. The most transformative CIOs we have worked with treat the senate as a co-author, not a gate. They engage early, they bring the right artifacts, and they pick platform patterns that respect the rhythm of academic governance. This post is what that operational practice looks like in production. It is written for the higher ed CIO who has been in front

Banner is older than most of the people running it. It also runs roughly 44 percent of finance ERP systems in higher education and a comparable share of the SIS market. For most institutions, Banner is not going anywhere on any timeline that fits in a strategic plan. The interesting question is not whether to replace it. It is what ServiceNow Banner integration actually looks like in production, the workflows worth orchestrating first, and the case management spine that makes

The first honest thing to say: Bettera does not do ERP replacement work. We do orchestration on ServiceNow. So why publish a research review on ERP failure rates in higher education? Because the research is the single most important context for the platform decision a CIO actually faces. If the published evidence shows that ERP replacement misses budget, schedule, or scope at the rates the data suggests, the right question is no longer "which ERP do we choose." It is "is repl

The instinct of every higher education CIO is to consolidate. Replace Banner. Replace PeopleSoft. Replace Workday and Salesforce and the seventeen point solutions that crept in during the pandemic. The instinct is wrong. There is a different pattern, and it is what ServiceNow actually does well. Every CIO who inherits a higher education technology estate eventually arrives at the same instinct. Replace it. Banner has to go. PeopleSoft has to go. Then Workday, Salesforce, Slat

You are the CIO who got ServiceNow into the institution for ITSM. It worked. The help desk is faster. The CMDB is getting cleaner. Faculty are happier than they were two years ago. Now you can see where else this thing can go. HR cases that today live in Outlook flags. Facilities requests that route through email. Provost workflows that nobody really owns. You also know the question that will be asked the moment you raise the idea. "Is that not what Workday is for?" The answe