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: 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: 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 employee offboarding higher education is usually sold as a security story, and it is one. An offboarding Lifecycle Event revokes access on the last day, closes accounts across IT, facilities, the library, and research systems, and leaves an audit trail, which kills the real risk of access that lingers for months after someone leaves. But offboarding is also the last thing a person feels about an institution they may have given decades to. Run as a checklist,

Drive attention, satisfaction, and belonging with ServiceNow Employee Workflows in Higher Education

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

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

TLDR: Now Assist in higher education AI governance is the conversation every CIO at a ServiceNow institution needs to be having right now, whether or not their campus has formally deployed AI. As of the April 9, 2026 ServiceNow commercial model announcement, AI is bundled into every tier of every ServiceNow solution. The AI already arrived with the existing investment. The question is no longer whether to procure Now Assist. It is whether the institution has the governance po

TLDR: ITSM to CSM in higher education is the single biggest leverage move in the ServiceNow lifecycle for an institution that has earned it. Most higher ed institutions know in theory that ServiceNow extends beyond IT into student services. Very few know how to read the signals that say their institution is operationally ready. The institutions that succeed do not extend ServiceNow because a vendor demo makes it compelling. They extend because their ITSM operation has produce

TLDRUnified knowledge management on ServiceNow is the move that turns the higher ed KB from "where articles go to die" into "the first place faculty and staff actually look." R1 institutions typically run three to five fragmented knowledge bases across Confluence, SharePoint, Notion, legacy Knowledge15, and shared drives. The institutions that fix this do not just migrate articles. They migrate the ownership model along with the content. This playbook covers the five-phase mi

TLDR ServiceNow service desk consolidation in higher education is the move that turns ServiceNow from central IT's tool into the institution's IT platform. R1 universities typically run three to seven service desks across central IT, college IT, library IT, ResLife, athletics, the medical campus, and research computing. Most exist for legitimate reasons. The institutions that succeed do not eliminate federated desks. They consolidate the platform layer (instance, KB, CMDB, ta

The ITSM Pro vs Standard decision is well-trodden in corporate IT. It takes a different shape in higher education. Federated IT means more agents per institution. Seasonal cycles mean ticket volume that triples in August and February. Annual budget cycles mean the upgrade math has to be defensible in a single fiscal year, not over a multi-year horizon. And the long-term modernization journey, which we walk through in our Pillar 6 piece on the ITSM modernization path, depends

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