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

TLDRHigher education advancement migration from Salesforce to ServiceNow is the most operationally consequential platform decision an R1 advancement team will face this decade. The institutions that adopted Salesforce Education Cloud and Marketing Cloud somewhere between 2018 and 2023 built years of donor data integrity, gift processing workflow, prospect moves management, and campaign automation on the platform. The ServiceNow + Tenon stack is now a credible alternative for

TLDRIf your institution has been running ServiceNow for ITSM or CSM and Salesforce for advancement, admissions, or student success, you may not have stepped back recently to ask whether the platforms still match the institution you have become. A lot has changed since most R1 institutions adopted Salesforce Education Cloud. Pricing has changed. AI capability has changed. ServiceNow's CRM capability has changed materially. Tenon brings native marketing automation to the Servic

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