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You Upgraded to ITSM Advanced. Now What? Five Higher Education IT Use Cases That Capture the ROI
TLDR: ITSM Advanced for higher education is the operating model upgrade most R1 institutions are now provisioning into without a clear plan for what to actually do with it. ServiceNow renamed the ITSM tiers in late 2025. Standard, Pro, and Enterprise became Foundation, Advanced, and Prime. The new Advanced tier adds Major Incident Management, On-Call Management, Change Management, Problem Management, AI Voice Agents, Process Mining, Platform Analytics Advanced, and the Advanc

David Holstein
Jun 3012 min read


ServiceNow Discovery for Higher Education: Tuning Patterns for Research Computing, Cloud, and the Institutional Footprint
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

David Holstein
Jun 913 min read


ITOM and CMDB Health in Higher Education: Why the Foundation Most R1 Institutions Are Standing on Is Quietly Failing
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

David Holstein
Jun 913 min read
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