Restoring Control Over a Critical Healthcare Platform
A leading healthcare provider regained visibility and commercial control over a critical ServiceNow platform by remediating a broken CMDB, strengthening vendor governance and stabilising licensing costs.
Context
As one of Australia’s largest diagnostic imaging and pathology providers, the organisation relied on ServiceNow to support complex, high-volume clinical workflows. Over time, however, the platform had become both operationally fragile and commercially opaque.
Licensing costs were escalating without clear justification, asset visibility had eroded, and confidence in the CMDB was effectively lost. Internal teams lacked the specialist capability required to assess or remediate the environment, leaving leadership exposed to both operational and financial risk.
Approach
This engagement focused on restoring control through objective assessment, technical clarity and strengthened commercial governance, providing the evidence required to act.
Define
The first step was establishing an honest baseline.
A deep CMDB assessment was conducted to identify where configuration, data quality and process maturity had degraded. Rather than offering generic recommendations, a detailed heat map was produced, clearly showing where capability gaps existed and what was required to move toward a mature, automated CMDB.
In parallel, a comprehensive platform audit exposed where the ServiceNow instance was over-engineered, under-utilised or misaligned with the organisation’s actual needs.
Align
With the baseline defined, technical and organisational alignment followed.
Asset and configuration processes were redefined and reconfigured within ServiceNow to reflect the reality of the organisation’s hardware and software estate. An honest assessment of internal capability highlighted where training and support were required to sustain the platform going forward.
This alignment ensured remediation efforts were practical, prioritised and achievable, rather than theoretical.
Govern
Governance was re-established through data and commercial clarity.
Armed with objective evidence, leadership was able to reset the vendor relationship from a position of knowledge rather than pressure. Procurement decisions were grounded in verified need, allowing unnecessary licence expansion to be challenged and future investment to be justified with confidence.
Governance shifted from reactive negotiation to informed control.
Outcome
Visibility, stability and confidence were restored.
The CMDB moved onto a clear path toward automation and accuracy, licensing costs were stabilised, and the CIO gained evidence-based documentation to secure funding for targeted remediation. Technical teams were left with a clear, actionable roadmap to address platform deficiencies without further vendor dependency.
The organisation regained control of a critical platform, operationally, technically and commercially.