3 ways to harness the power of low-code in government & public services

In the digital era, consumers measure the quality of a business experience against the best encounters they’ve had, regardless of industry.

That means if they’ve enjoyed top-tier convenience and satisfaction from a streaming service or food delivery app, they expect the same level of excellence from every other business they interact with—even their local government or other public services.

To provide the intuitive and seamless experiences citizens demand, government agencies need to offer simplified, unified, digital services. The power of low-code can help in three ways.

1. Converting backlogs into swift assistance

Low-code solutions provide a transformative way for public sector organisations to quickly create solutions to address the biggest challenges facing their business. By enabling nontechnical employees to develop their own applications, low-code can streamline workflows, reduce bottlenecks, shorten queue times and speed up project delivery.

Gartner® predicts “over 35% of government legacy applications will be replaced by solutions developed on low-code application platforms and maintained by fusion teams by 2025”.¹

The City of Los Angeles created and deployed a custom low-code app in just two months to process a greater volume of applications for emergency rental units, such as oxygen tanks and other life-saving machinery, faster and more efficiently.

Thanks to the optimised application process, including a specialised customer service hotline, the city was able to capture 4,800 rental applications on the app’s launch day and an additional 60,000 applications over the following two weeks. As a result, the city is getting help to those in need in a much timelier fashion.

2. Unifying services across agencies

Many government websites require members of the public to manually complete forms. Whether a completed form is delivered to the correct agency is another matter. That’s because government agencies often struggle with siloed IT functions across dozens of departments.

Low-code can enable governments to unite disparate departments, unify legacy systems, and connect agencies so that they work in harmony. This allows teams to guide users with a visual sequence of ongoing service tasks.

Citizens can access a one-stop shop for all public-facing services. Employees benefit from access to the same single system of record. This helps eliminate departmental silos and encourages greater collaboration.

When the New South Wales Government of Australia needed to coordinate multi-agency disaster response across the 300,000-square-mile state, it launched a low-code app in just one week.

The app provides a central hub to rank, track, and manage disaster requests. It helps improve officer safety while enabling the state’s spread-out (and often remote) emergency services teams to seamlessly collaborate and efficiently mobilise resources.

Since the app’s launch, the NSW Police Force has saved more than AUD$10.5 million and 30,000 hours of work and mobilisation.

3. Enhancing field experience

Low-code can enable public services organisations to build apps that let people in the field capture customer information and access appropriate systems. In this way, workers can diagnose and solve issues as they arise instead of obtaining data manually and responding later.

Self-service portals and mobile apps, for example, allow people to engage with their government and quickly address issues outside of typical working hours. The result is a B2C-quality, mobile-friendly, consistent brand experience.

To significantly decrease child malnutrition in the South African province of Limpopo, ServiceNow Elite Partner FlyForm built a low-code app for Ndlovu Care Group. The goal was to digitise the process of collecting and managing data to track outreach work, health screenings, and medical records.

Thanks to the app’s success, Ndlovu has reduced the malnutrition ratefrom 45% to 21% among more than 5,000 children.

Join the low-code revolution

The increase in demand for digital services means governments must drive digital transformation and engage citizens with simpler and more unified experiences. Low-code can close the digital divide by levelling the app development playing field, reducing costs and connecting legacy systems.

By simplifying and democratising the development process, low-code helps enable all areas of government and public services to ideate, create and provide feedback on solutions that will enhance services and operations for citizens.

Find out more about how ServiceNow helps organisations innovate with low-code development.

¹ Gartner, Press release: Gartner Announces the Top 10 Government Technology Trends for 2023, 17 April 2023

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