More Value, Fewer Tools: How WashU Stretches a Flat Budget in Higher Education With EA

A Decentralized University, Growing Complexity, and Budgets That Don't Grow

For IT leaders in higher education, the math rarely changes. The pressure to modernize and stay current never lets up, but the budget does not grow to meet it. At some point, the only way forward is to get more value out of what the institution already owns, rather than buying yet another tool. For Washington University in St. Louis (WashU), that shift from acquiring to optimizing was a practical necessity, not a nice-to-have.

That is harder than it sounds in a university this decentralized. Alongside a large central IT team, every college runs its own IT function, and hundreds of applications are owned and managed across those groups. As a major research institution with a premier medical school, WashU also carries the IT weight of government research contracts and clinical practice.

Knowing what you own, who owns it, and what it costs is the precondition for getting more value from it, and that picture simply did not exist.

Hundreds of Applications, No Single Source of Truth, and Duplicate Spend Nobody Could See

Before Ardoq, understanding the application portfolio meant starting from scratch every time.

"Every time we wanted to do this, it'd be a project. Some poor business analyst would be charged with going out and starting an inventory, bugging people to say, can you tell me about what things you have? They'd put together a spreadsheet, run the project, and then that spreadsheet and all that stuff would be stuck in an archive somewhere. No one else would know about it. And when a new thing came up, we started the whole cycle over again."

- Jason Clevenger, Senior Solution Architect at WashU

The university tried the obvious fix with one master spreadsheet to rule them all, but it never held. In a decentralized organization where applications and their owners are spread across many IT teams, keeping a single spreadsheet up to date "turned out to be a real nightmare." And this lack of visibility has a price. With hundreds of applications spread across the colleges, many did more or less the same job, and every duplicate carried its own license, its own support burden, and its own slice of a budget that wasn't growing.

The result was a familiar trap for enterprise architects. The work was real, but it was invisible and repetitive, and the value was hard to prove to the rest of the organization. Each cycle rebuilt knowledge that the last cycle had already captured and then lost.

How WashU Used Ardoq

Game-Changing Capabilities to Engage the Organization

Surveys were what got Jason excited about Ardoq and the possibilities of a different approach to EA. Finally, a platform that had a capability he had been quietly wanting for years.

Surveys solve the outreach problem directly. Instead of a business analyst chasing people and re-entering responses, the survey is pre-populated with data already in Ardoq, and when an owner clicks submit, it updates Ardoq automatically.

"It wasn't like Qualtrics, where the survey comes back to that poor business analyst who has to enter the data. The survey [in Ardoq] automatically updates. That's different. That's what we need."

- Jason Clevenger, Senior Solution Architect at WashU

Paired with Ardoq Broadcasts, it gave him something he had never had: a way to reach out to an application owner a year later to ask whether they still had the system and could update its properties. He calls that "a game changer" for working in such a diversified environment.

Two other capabilities stood out in the evaluation process.

• Scenarios: Offered them what-if planning for adding and removing parts of the ecosystem, which will be useful as they mature their EA practice.
• Visualizations: These landed immediately with stakeholders. Diagrams are generated from live data rather than drawn by hand. They redraw instantly as you click through them, and each application box carries its own logo rather than being just another cryptic rectangle.

"People get it right away," Jason says.

A Highly Flexible Platform Configured to Their Specific Needs

From the start, Jason treated Ardoq as a practice to invest in, not just a tool to buy. The team began with Ardoq's best practices, sense-checked their approach against Gartner, then configured the platform to fit the university.

They implemented the HERM higher education reference model for business and technical capabilities and began mapping applications against it, so that when someone arrives wanting to buy a new product, they can quickly identify whether something already in the portfolio can do the job. This streamlining is at the heart of driving effective application rationalization: looking at hundreds of applications, many doing more or less the same thing, and working out where the duplication is.

Building Trust and Buy-In by Positioning EA as a Service to Other Teams

Jason is equally clear that the platform is only half the story. The other half is cultural. He positions architecture as a service to the rest of the university: ask people to fill out a survey, then give the data back, train their teams, and help when they need analysis. That critical reciprocity earns real engagement and buy-in from his stakeholders across the organization.

Improved Narrative and User Experience for Non-EA Users With the New Ardoq Experience: Skeptic to Convert in a Week

When Ardoq launched its new platform experience, Jason was initially not keen on the change.

"I was super skeptical. I'm an old guy, so change doesn't come easy to me. I was like the last person on Internet Explorer 6."

- Jason Clevenger, Senior Solution Architect at WashU

His first instinct was to hold onto the legacy version for as long as possible. Because the university runs a single production instance, switching the experience meant switching it for everyone at once, so the team tested carefully, turning the new experience on for a couple of hours at a time over a few days and watching how people reacted.

Three things changed his mind:

• The new home page that surfaces dashboards, cards, and the team's most popular widgets up front, with a central narrative telling people how to use Ardoq.
• A data inventory page that gives non-architects a familiar spreadsheet-like interface without losing Ardoq's power, including references that become clickable links through to related objects, and a new hierarchical view that makes parent-child structure easy to read.
• The component overview page that brings every field, reference, and visualization for an object together in one place, reachable by a quick Control K search.

"I thought it would take us maybe a month, maybe six weeks. It took us about four days to get most of it done."

- Jason Clevenger, Senior Solution Architect at WashU

Once he saw how those three pieces worked together, the rollout moved fast. Jason had expected the migration to be painful and possibly drawn out over weeks, as is typical with major platform updates. With the new Ardoq experience, his team was confident about turning it on after only a week.

Key Outcomes With Ardoq

Surveys and Broadcasts That Keep Hundreds of Applications Current

The outreach problem that had defeated every master spreadsheet is now a repeatable process. Pre-populated surveys go out to application owners across the university's many IT teams, and responses flow straight back into Ardoq without anyone re-keying data. Early feedback has been positive: Jason keeps an eye on who is logging in and often reaches out to thank new users and offer help, and the replies tend to be some version of "This is great, I found what I needed right away, Ardoq is wonderful." The data is not complete yet, and the rollout is ongoing, but the everyday usefulness is landing with the people it was built for, not just with the architects.

Best-in-Class Support as a Core Part of the Value for WashU

"Ardoq has the best user support ever," Jason says. "I've dealt with user support for decades. Your people get on right away. If they don't have an answer, they go find it. They're tenacious." When the team needed to learn Ardoq's Gremlin query language for more complex work, support helped them get there. For Jason, that responsiveness is not a side benefit; it is part of the platform's value.

Ardoq Established as the System of Record, Feeding ServiceNow

One of the most strategically interesting outcomes is how Ardoq fits alongside the university's other systems. Rather than letting ServiceNow act as the system of record for applications and feed Ardoq, as many institutions do, WashU has done the reverse: Ardoq is the system of record for the application inventory, pushing data out to ServiceNow, with business capabilities likely to follow. That integration is already live, and it reflects exactly the kind of deliberate ecosystem design (Ardoq, ServiceNow, and Collibra each doing what they do best) that solution architecture is meant to figure out.

Jason's Advice to Higher Education and IT Leaders

The thing I do best is point: go that way, not that way. We're the bridge between a business problem and a technical solution.

- Jason Clevenger, Senior Solution Architect at WashU

For architects in similar institutions, Jason's advice is less about the tool and more about the practice around it. Architecture, as he sees it, lives at the pre-project stage, where the job is to lay out options, make a recommendation, and then sell that recommendation to the people who fund and implement it. That often means helping a team reconsider a product they are already excited about, without simply saying no.

"We're not very good at saying no, and we don't want to say no," he says. "You want to empower a 'have you thought about doing it this way' kind of choice." The deeper point is about managing change without paralysis.

"You can't be so cautious that nothing gets done. You've got to have some illumination on what the likely outcome is. And Ardoq helps provide some of that illumination."

- Jason Clevenger, Senior Solution Architect at WashU

Cloud-Scale Use Cases and a Disciplined Move Into AI

The core portfolio of applications, organizations, capabilities, and people is now established, so the team is moving outward into new use cases: migrating individual IT teams' spreadsheets into Ardoq, supporting InfoSec with disaster recovery planning, and looking at bringing the infrastructure team's roughly 2,000 servers into the platform.

AI is a growing part of the picture, and the team is approaching it the same way they approach everything else: turn it on, review it, and test it against a real problem before scaling. They have enabled Ardoq's AI features, and one has stood out enough to build an experiment around.

Ardoq's AI-generated capability suggestions inside Surveys offer two or three recommended business capabilities for a given application. That matters because matching applications to HERM's roughly 150 capabilities had always required training people on both the application and the reference model, which made it slow going.

"That AI feature was completely unexpected, because that's exactly the way we wanted to be able to do this."

- Jason Clevenger, Senior Solution Architect at WashU

The team is now running a proof of concept with a product owner who manages 70 to 80 applications. It is early, and the results are not in yet, but the aspiration is clear: if the suggestions hold up, Jason expects this capability will help push the team "through the last mile" of capability modeling, a problem they have wrestled with for some time. He would also like to see the feature reach beyond Surveys and across the university's other capability models.

Looking further ahead, Jason sees Ardoq playing a central role in governing the university's fast-growing AI ecosystem. As bots proliferate across students, faculty, researchers, and administrators, someone has to know what each one does, who owns it, and what it connects to.

"Something's gonna break. Where do we find out who owns the bot and what it connects to? That's what Ardoq does."

- Jason Clevenger, Senior Solution Architect at WashU

About Washington University in St. Louis

Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) is a private research university founded in 1853 and based in St. Louis, Missouri. It enrolls close to 16,000 students across schools spanning arts and sciences, engineering, business, law, medicine, and public health, and is affiliated with 26 Nobel Laureates. With more than 23,000 employees, over $1 billion in annual research, and one of the largest academic clinical practices in the nation, it operates at the scale and complexity of a small city.