ServiceNow CMDB Data Quality Services: Treat the CMDB as a Product or Watch It Rot
A platform owner at a European insurer called me on a Tuesday morning with a question that sounded simple. He wanted to know why his change advisory board kept approving changes to CIs that had been decommissioned eighteen months ago. His CMDB said the servers were live. Discovery said the servers were live. The datacentre said the servers were scrap. Somebody was lying, and the board was signing off on ghosts. I told him this was not really a data problem. It was an ownership problem wearing a data costume. His CMDB had four different teams contributing records, no product owner, no reconciliation rules that anyone could name out loud, and a Discovery schedule that had last been tuned in 2022. The result was exactly what you would expect. A large expensive table full of half-truths that nobody trusted enough to use for a decision and nobody owned enough to fix. This is the pattern I see almost every time a mid-market or enterprise buyer asks for ServiceNow CMDB data quality services. The instinct is to reach for a tool, a bulk cleanup script, a consultant with a checklist. What is actually needed is a product mindset. A CMDB is not a database. It is a product with users, a...
