G2C Series: Exploiting the pattern

[Robert Maxwell]

This is the third 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 articles are available at: 1/4 and 2/4

This article will describe how the service development pattern was exploited and another of the subsequent G2C portals delivered on ServiceNow.

We now had the building blocks of a reusable solution to what would turn out to be a commonly occurring scenario for the provision of citizen-facing services. Whilst obviously there will be nuances and completely different end state requirements, the concept was now in place. The internal architects charged with finding a way to solution G2C services rapidly for the agency could now call upon the ServiceNow platform for their business problem. If it required a way to for citizens to interact, the service portal would be leveraged, if it needed workflow and potentially integration, flow designer and integration hub was available, and for any manual processing, a workspace. Using this blueprint, the agency has now deployed 4 additional G2C portals with even more on the way.

One of the more interesting deployments is the Visa Refund portal, where no less than the Prime Minister of the day required the agency to allow submission of claims from certain classes of visa holders to be able to request a refund on the application fee. And in the fast paced world of the pandemic, very similar to the TEP described in the previous few articles, this was again very visible and high profile with the added necessity to deploy as quickly as possible. This was again made possible by the inherent out-of-the-box platform capabilities such as those already mentioned, but also decision tables so applications could be triaged in an automated fashion before even getting to an agent to further process. Using decision tables allowed the simplification of the data collection catalogue item and being baked into flow designer logic also reduced the complexity of the end to end workflow.

The next article will show an example of how we transitioned seamlessly from G2C services into G2B leveraging the platform.