G2C Series intro

[Robert Maxwell]

This is the first in a series of articles that will detail lived experiences of how ServiceNow has helped improve government agility in a time of digital upheaval and forced evolution in the context of government to citizen (G2C) services.

If you will, cast your mind back to a simpler time when press conferences were all about sports, and ad nauseum in-depth statistical analysis of case numbers purely meant it was monthly reporting time. Back when new G2C services laboured through weeks and most times, months of approvals, design, approvals, development, approvals, redesign, refactors, re-platforming, restarting (!), testing, more approvals and finally deployment. One abbreviation, with a "-19" following that shall not be muttered seemed to change everything… Well, everything related to time.

Now all of a sudden we have days to do all of that.

"The international border is closing.

People will need an exemption to cross it.

Can we stand up a portal this weekend?"

First things first, the answer was yes. And this was the genesis of what became known as the Travel Exemptions Portal and what turned out to be the single point of contact for over 1.2 million people wanting - and some absolutely needing, an exemption to travel in and / or out of Australia. It also became the template for the question that has been heard again since.

Let's explore what the 3 key reasons why ServiceNow was chosen as the platform for this service were.

1. Trust: ServiceNow already had runs on the board at this customer - it was already a known quantity. ServiceNow had recently been implemented as a replacement in the IT domain and that project's success led directly to the selection of ServiceNow for this important and highly visible workload.
2. Time to value: This is in the context where value equals effectiveness versus something like ROI. Measured in days, and having synergies with a related ServiceNow success story, the customer needed assurance that the portal would be ready in time and the key factor behind this was the almost out-of-the-box ability to provide a secure engagement channel with a supporting workflow engine (that and of course ServiceNow's local Customer Outcomes team who done all the initial work!).
3. Enterprise Platform with Case Management built-in: This one almost speaks for itself. Way back then ServiceNow was already considered a leader in Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms and Customer Engagement - that’s you and I as the customer in this scenario. There was also a forward thinking component here from the business that this shouldn't just be a point solution. Fast forward to the time of writing and this portal did indeed turn out to be the first of many (more on those in later articles).

Read the next article to see how the portal was delivered, the challenges overcome, and where it is now.