TLDR: Application portfolio management in higher education is the least glamorous work available and one of the highest-return. Decades of departmental purchasing, grant-funded tools, gifted software, and point solutions have produced a portfolio in the hundreds at most institutions, much of it invisible to central IT and some of it with no accountable owner at all. APM is the business record of that portfolio: what the institution owns, who owns it, what it costs, when it re

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

TLDRServiceNow Discovery for higher education requires meaningfully different tuning patterns than enterprise Discovery deployments. R1 institutions run federated identity rather than monolithic Active Directory, three or more cloud accounts with no central governance, research computing infrastructure that may live outside the institutional network, departmental servers owned outside central IT, classroom and residence hall technology purchased by colleges, and a long tail o

TLDRITOM and CMDB health in higher education is the foundational layer that determines whether every other ServiceNow program at an R1 institution can deliver value. Most higher ed CMDBs are quietly in worse shape than the dashboards suggest. CI counts have stopped growing. Discovery coverage is below what the institution thinks it is. Service definitions list owners who left the institution years ago. Change management impact analysis is being done outside the CMDB in tribal