2022 NBA All-Star fans celebrate the season safely

Continuing a sporting tradition
The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a global sports and media organization with the mission to inspire and connect people everywhere through the power of basketball. Built around five professional sports leagues: the NBA, WNBA, NBA G League, NBA 2K League, and Basketball Africa League, the NBA has established a major international presence with games and programming available in 214 countries and territories in more than 50 languages, and merchandise for sale in more than 200 countries and territories on all seven continents.

One of the highlights every season is NBA All-Star, which brings together basketball’s brightest stars for a global celebration of the game.

Still in the midst of the global pandemic, the NBA looked to find a safe way to put together the event. Fortunately, the NBA had a strategic game plan.

Building on success
The NBA first partnered with ServiceNow in 2020 when the league restarted its season in July of that year at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando, Florida, after play was suspended in March 2020 due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. ServiceNow helped ensure those living on the NBA’s campus were complying with rigorous health and safety protocols by integrating regular testing into access mechanisms. Customized workflows were created to screen, track, and grant tiered access across the respective campuses.

More than a year later, when it was time to plan for the 2022 NBA All-Star Game held in front of fans, the league once again had to adapt to an ever-changing COVID-19 environment and turned again to ServiceNow.

Keeping an eye on the ball
The 2022 NBA All-Star Game, held in the middle of the 2021-22 season, took place at Rocket Mortgage Field House, a 19,000-capacity venue in Cleveland, Ohio. The NBA needed an effective and user-friendly way to handle a range of staff and guest needs, from HR requests to guest registration, while seeking to effectively manage health and safety processes.

“When we started this journey, we needed a platform that was going to be able to adapt quickly to the ever-changing landscape that the pandemic has brought,” says the NBA Head of IT Customer Experience, Nick Ricciardi.

Creating an intuitive, connected experience
When it comes to technology it is important to get it right. And the NBA chose well. Nick explains: “ServiceNow has met the challenge given the fact that it is extremely configurable, with a quick time to delivery, providing a very intuitive connected experience.”

With ServiceNow Workplace Service Delivery (WSD), a lot of the employee and guest vaccination information was pre-processed, aggregated from multiple sources, and pre-populated in the system. This saved significant time and effort as an individual’s information was readily available, allowing the NBA to focus on verifying their negative test on-site, and leading to a much faster process for allocating the necessary credentials.

Through ServiceNow’s streamlined system, the NBA efficiently and seamlessly processed the credentials of over 4,800 staff and guests in attendance over the course of five days. What’s more, over 2,000 tests were deployed and integrated with the event’s credential validation system.

“In order to issue credentials for all NBA, WNBA, G League, 2K, and BAL events, there are health and safety protocols,” says Andrea Grumet, NBA Senior League Credentialist. “The integration with ServiceNow has made our working lives much more efficient. We’re much more streamlined in how we issue credentials.”

Extending the impact across the organization
The impact of the platform moved beyond helping ensure the efficiency behind the event. The NBA is now looking at areas where it can extend its use across the organization, including managing staffing and conference room reservations.

The NBA has 1,800+ employees who also need to feel safe. “We were using the health and safety module within ServiceNow for daily health verification. Since we started, we’ve used it over 40,000 times,” says Head of NBA Benefits and Wellbeing, Danielle Shanes. Having an integrated and easy-to-use system put employees’ minds at ease.

“Knowing that the technology is keeping the facility safe allowed us to feel more comfortable interacting with people and really being able to collaborate in person again,” Nick concludes.

Download PDF