Using better visibility to tame India’s ‘digital elephant’

Have you heard the tale about the blind men and the elephant? A group of blind men who’ve never seen an elephant touch different parts of the animal and try to figure out what it is.

The first man touches the elephant’s side and says, “An elephant is like a wall.” The second touches a tusk and says, “An elephant is like a spear.” The third touches the trunk and says, “An elephant is like a snake.”

Without seeing the full picture, it’s impossible to truly understand the world around us. We can only see the truth by comparing and combining different perspectives. In India, the government has a new “digital elephant” to decipher.

Wrangling the data

As part of the Digital India by 2025 strategy, the Indian government is in the middle of an enormous digitization project involving all departments, agencies, and states. This digitization will create a lot of data.

The Open Government Data (OGD) Platform, which aims to aggregate all public sector data, contains data sets from 165 departments across 33 sectors. That’s an enormous amount of information—and it’s growing every day.

Recording all that data is only one step of the digitization process. Government organizations also need to standardize, analyze, and report on the data to make it actionable. Getting a clear picture of progress on digital projects across state lines is currently difficult, for example.

How can leaders track their disaster recovery management and solve problems quickly? How can they report on Early Harvest Programs? How can they understand the amount of BSNL fiber being laid across the country? How many villages have been connected as part of the remote auditing project?

To answer these questions, government leaders need a single source of truth that provides visibility into the status of their digital projects and the IT assets enabling them end to end (or trunk to tail). Having a clear picture can help leaders make intelligent decisions about strategy, allocate funds efficiently, focus on priority projects, and quickly shift budgets when needed.

End-to-end visibility

What does that look like in practice? As with the elephant in the story, a lot of parts need to come together to create a full picture:

• Consolidating technology systems across government to provide a consistent user interface

• Integrating applications and data sets to increase visibility into service workflows

• Breaking the barriers between departments, agencies, and state governments to streamline data sharing and collaboration

• Implementing governance and compliance structures such as role-based access controls (RBACs) to ensure information security isn’t compromised

Many departments are already attempting to deliver parts of this program. To hit the 2025 target of the Digital India strategy, the government will need to work with best-in-class technology partners.

That’s where ServiceNow can help. When it comes to delivering visibility in complex IT environments at speed, without compromising security or compliance, we say yes.

See the full picture

We work with government organizations to integrate systems, simplify user interfaces, increase visibility, and accelerate digital projects. As the foundation for all digital workflows, the Now Platform can connect people, functions, and systems across any organization.

Our solutions help organizations make better sense of project data with RBACs, dashboarding, drill-down views, and real-time data visualizations. That means everyone in government can access the level of information they need through a single interface— and have the power to put that data into action immediately.

Because ServiceNow protects sensitive data using platform encryption, meeting regulatory requirements is never a concern for government agencies.

Find out how ServiceNow can help any government visualize its “digital elephant.”

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