Treat Your CMDB as a Product, Not a Project: Why ServiceNow CMDB Data Quality Services Pay for Themselves
An infrastructure lead at a European insurer emailed me last month with a screenshot of their CMDB health dashboard. Completeness at 42%. Compliance at 61%. Correctness sitting somewhere between "we don't know" and "please don't ask." Around it, four years of implementation partners, three Discovery relaunches, and a CMDB governance board that had not met in seven months. His question was not really about the numbers. It was: how do we stop this from being someone's cleanup project every 18 months? That is the right question. And the answer is not another cleanup project. It is treating the CMDB as a product with an owner, a roadmap, and a working definition of "done" that is not a one-time percentage but a service level. That shift is what ServiceNow CMDB data quality services are actually selling when they are worth paying for, and it is the shift most enterprises never make.