G2C Series - Delivery & challenges

[Robert Maxwell]

This is the second article in in a series that will detail lived experiences of how ServiceNow has helped improve government agility in a time of digital upheaval and forced evolution.

The previous article is the series intro and talks about the requirement, and some of the reasons why ServiceNow was chosen - it's available here.

This article will dive into how the Travel Exemption Portal (TEP) was delivered and the challenges associated.

Challenge 1: Demand to Deployment

Time to deliver: You might recall from the previous article those words: Can we stand up a portal this weekend?"

This didn't just present technical hurdles. There was a fundamental need to define the actual requirements. The business needed to quickly understand the capabilities and any limitations of the platform. But this is where the flexibility and intrinsic out of the box capabilities of the platform comes to the fore. The core external facing requirement was obviously an engagement channel for customers - i.e. the service portal. Subsequently the workflow, met by Flow Designer and the business user interface was easily and quickly configured into Workspace. All of this wrapped into an App Engine build with a CSM flavour is a big part of what made the deployment and subsequent maturation of the service a success.

Challenge 2: Data Security and Governance

The second challenge to overcome was purely internal to the customer.

Even with the business requirement to deploy quickly, there were to be no shortcuts around governance, data security and integrity. Out of session approvals aside, this was still data being collected by government, its scope included Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and as such needed to be handled appropriately. And this is where the layered defence in depth security stature of the platform can make a difference with column level encryption, and as the capability has matured, adaptive authentication.

Challenge 3: Goalposts changing

The baseline application delivered was perfectly fit for service - the day it went into production. As the pandemic changed, as new rules from government were introduced and as vaccines became available, the end user UX needed tweaks - and sometimes wholesale changes, to support the business requirements. Again, the ease of which these changes were able to be made proved the underlying value of ServiceNow to support workloads like this for government. TEP has now been decommissioned, another change, and it handled over 800,000 requests for 1.2 million travellers and had in excess of 600,000 individual users.

One of the best things to come out of the whole exercise was the confidence now shown by the agency to look towards ServiceNow as the platform for repeatable services, with their own nuances obviously and what we now have as effectively a pattern to deploy citizen-facing portals rapidly. In the next article I'll cover the how this pattern was exploited to deliver more G2C portals on the platform.

[Randheer Singh]

Hi @Robert Maxwell  ,
Thanks for sharing this.
I am PM in the ServiceNow platform security team and am responsible for Authentication products.
If you have feedback or any idea to share about Adaptive Authentication or any other platform security product. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me. I will be more than happy to have a session with you.

Thanks,

Randheer