Keith Bluestein has spent decades implementing enterprise IT across the U.S. government, as part of his senior IT leadership roles at multiple departments and offices, such as the U.S. Navy and NASA.
In 2009, as CIO of the Navy Engineering Logistics Office overseeing all Navy-classified programs, Keith implemented ServiceNow to manage IT services. At the time, there was no SaaS option, and his team had to build their own air-gapped instance.
He became an early adopter of the platform across federal agencies. Back then, it felt like the right choice to take; fifteen years later, the picture looks very different.
Today, Keith is Deputy CIO of the Judicial Branch of Arizona in Maricopa County. At the time of arrival, he inherited something familiar to many of his peers: a multi-million-dollar contract for a platform nobody actually used and that no longer met the organization's needs.
After a fresh evaluation, Keith and his team decided to move away from what once was the only choice and give InvGate a go. This is why he never looked back.
The inheritance
The Judicial Branch of Arizona in Maricopa County is one of the largest court systems in the United States, serving more than 4.7 million residents with 3,000 employees and 160 judicial officers. On his very first day, Keith walked into a situation familiar to anyone managing enterprise IT in government: a multi-million-dollar contract for a platform nobody actually used, that didn't meet their needs and that they couldn't even fix.
Years before, the organization had invested in a major enterprise platform. As a return, it got a heavily customized implementation built by people who were long gone, with no documentation, impossible to modify, frozen in place.
Meanwhile, the actual work of managing IT assets was happening on spreadsheets that depended on one or two people who knew how to read them. New employees signed paper forms and when someone left, recovering the list of their assets meant searching a document row by row.
The CFO’s question — “I gave you all this money, what was it spent on?” — had no clear answer.
.jpg)
Recommended content
Access the recording
Listen to Keith Bluestein's story in first person in this Industry Forum
A multi-million-dollar question
Time passed, and in 2025, the county allocated a multi-million-dollar budget to the Judicial Branch for endpoint replacement. The team was faced with a conundrum: how could they prove the spend was going to the right place if they were relying on a spreadsheet?
The task required pulling data from multiple sources, reconciling mismatched lists, and making decisions on information that might be months out of date.
The existing platform wasn't going anywhere, but waiting another year for a "real" rollout wasn't an option either. The CFO needed numbers. The asset inventory needed to exist.
Read the full success story
Download case study
From decision to ground truth
After assessing a few Asset Management products, the team brought InvGate Asset Management forward. "Anybody can use this. It's so easy to use," Keith said, and that was exactly what they needed.
The team didn't need outside engineers to get it working, or custom code to fit their processes. They configured it themselves and moved on.
InvGate’s Agent was deployed across the fleet via Microsoft Intune. Eighteen hours later, it had reached every endpoint, and five days after that, the Judicial Branch had something it had never had before: a complete, live picture of its entire asset inventory.
Roughly four thousand machines across five judicial divisions, reporting hardware, software, and health data in one place. No manual entry. No reconciliation. No hoping the data was right.
Keith’s reaction was a single question: “Why couldn’t we ever do this before?”
A world they didn’t know existed
At a Gartner CIO luncheon, Keith mentioned InvGate. The reaction around the table came back fast: “Thank God. Everyone keeps telling us ServiceNow, ServiceNow, ServiceNow. We hadn’t gotten validation that there was another option.”
Keith knew exactly what he was hearing. Fear of deviation. The quiet, expensive consensus that keeps organizations locked into tools too complex to fit and too rigid to fix.
When we asked him how he’d describe what finding InvGate actually felt like, he didn’t reach for a metric. He reached for a movie.
Looking to achieve similar results? Get a 30-day free trial of InvGate Asset Management or talk to our team to see if our solutions fit your needs.
