How should government make itself easy to deal with, while keeping the people of Australia safe and improving the services provided to them?

The Federal Government has recognised the importance of data in its Digital Government Strategy, which states: “Data has become a high value commodity and is recognised as a strategic asset for government”.

This demonstrates the Government's recognition that improved government services begin by ensuring systems connect seamlessly, data that serves customers' needs is shared securely, and feedback from every interaction is captured in an intelligent platform.

Data is already transforming how many public agencies modernise.

With nearly 22,000 staff – close to 18,000 of which are officers – the NSW Police Force knew they needed to digitise and modernise the complex, labour-intensive, manual, disconnected work behind the scenes.

How did the NSW Police Force create an award-winning platform?

The solution came in the form of the ServiceNow-based platform: BluePortal, a single, cloud-hosted platform designed to digitise more than 130 services – from finance and HR, to records, training and shared services. It didn’t just allow them to streamline what Gary Betts, the Director of Corporate and Business Systems at NSW Police Force described as “copious amounts of inefficiencies and hundreds of manual processes”, it enabled them to create a platform that the NSW Police Force is very rightly proud of. An extract from this report, prepared after the ANZ Executive Police, Justice and Emergency Services Forum, explains:

"BluePortal and other digital projects means that the organisation is starting to look a lot different than it did three years ago, and for the better. We are helping to avoid mental injury, and are focussed on officer safety. We are determined to support police in a more reliable way, and to enable them to do their jobs not only smarter and faster, but to get better outcomes for victims and to prevent crimes."

- Gordon Dunsford, former CITO and Executive Director, Digital Technology & Innovation, NSW Police Force

Connecting systems to improve government services

As the police example illustrates, one of the best ways to improve government services is by connecting enterprise systems across departments. When this happens, multiple parties can work together to create better outcomes whilst improving employee experiences, reducing the complexity of customer services, and enabling best-in-class operations. However, doing this successfully requires a new way of thinking.

The digital imperative for creating intuitive, data-informed government solutions

The Australian Government has a vision to enable citizens to access all government services digitally by 2025; to make government services connected, secure, easy-to-use, and accessible via a single digital identity. This will be a critical first step towards creating an intuitive, data-driven and data-informed solution.

The next step will involve a unified, platform-based approach to connect people, employees and customers. ServiceNow customers who have adopted this approach have experienced greater operational efficiency, reduced operating costs, reduced errors, improved speed and quality of customer service delivery, and enhanced user and customer experiences, all with a lower total cost of ownership.

How the 'platform of platforms’ is being used by government

Connecting multiple systems through a single platform is not a pipe dream. It’s a reality already in use by many agencies across Australian Federal and State Government departments.

• ServiceNow is the platform behind the NSW COVID vaccination rollout. It underpins a fit-for-purpose system that is scalable, highly configurable, flexible and secure.
• The Department of Home Affairs uses ServiceNow extensively as part of their strategy to ‘renovate their IT core’ by automating, digitising and improving customer services.
• Several law enforcement agencies use ServiceNow to manage investigations, including BluePortal, which is built on ServiceNow.
• In the UK, the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) and Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) use ServiceNow as a service portal and to bring together six citizen-facing applications, respectively. While NHS Blood and Transport unifies their entire employee service experience with a self-service portal built on ServiceNow
• In the US, the Department of Energy uses our digital workflows extensively to consolidate and integrate IT management systems and ensure the right data gets to the right stakeholders at the right time. To achieve this, it replaced multiple outdated software products with ServiceNow's cloud-based digital workflow platform, creating a single console for all IT service management (ITSM) operations.

The power of a single platform has significantly improved communication and transformed service delivery. How? Through the intelligent use of intuitive, data-driven and data-informed solutions.

Seamless service

Great things happen when services are connected in an intuitive, convenient and integrated way. Connected platforms drive efficiency for case workers by securely providing the information they need to deliver better outcomes at speed. They can manage their work needs, experiences and transitions from a single operating system. 

Connected, intuitive systems can help government departments improve both customer and staff experiences. By connecting systems in meaningful ways, processes become less frustrating, productivity improves, and, in the case of the police, officer and community safety is increased.

Data-driven

Being data-driven means making informed decisions based on a risk framework that ensures those decisions are taken in the context of all the information available at that time to make a real-time action.

The NSW Police Force's BluePortal, a real-life example, arose out of truly tragic circumstances: but this created the determination to make sure this kind of tragedy could be averted by improving risk assessments in future

In 2010 when executing a search warrant, Detective Constable William Crews was tragically killed. “Following that, the police began a review of search warrant practices” and, as part of the BluePortal platform, created CREWS, a Corporate Risk (Enterprise and Warrant) System, in his honour, which is “a risk management tool to identify, reduce and manage risk.” CREWS is built using ServiceNow's Integrated Risk Management solution on the platform.

In the case of CREWS, the data collected within the platform intelligently informs the Police by providing the latest information and advice to ensure the safety of officers in their interactions with the public, and with suspects or witnesses in their crime investigations. By collecting both meta-data and aggregated data, new instructions or advice can be provided and inform real-time behaviours in the field.

The resultant interplay of data exchange saves time and creates efficiency, but it goes far further. When all this data is used to train the artificial intelligence capabilities in the platform, it becomes possible to do predictive analysis to provide relevant, personalised and data-informed experiences.

ServiceNow's mission is to make work flow unimpeded – for everyone from people in remote locations to soldiers on the front line. It's critical to bring data together in context, which provides it with greater meaning. As a result, better and faster decisions can be made based on documented and auditable evidence, informing intelligent and appropriate actions.

Data-informed

Being data-informed means knowing what to do with the data and how to incorporate the human element into workflows.

When data is pulled from interconnected systems in use for everyday customer services, this improves government resilience. Customers provide data – but we provide meaning back to customers.

Every action should create data that further informs organisations on how to improve performance using AI. The insights informed by the intelligent assessment of real-life activity can be used as a further driver of economic activity and improved citizen service.

This can be validated and governed within a risk framework that protects employees and minimises the chance of errors. And at the same time, we provide options for high security, protected level platform deployments to ensure the security of sensitive citizen data, and resilience against data breaches, cyber-attacks, and third-party risks.

We connect everything to unlock the power of data

ServiceNow helps the government workforce do what they do, better. Our goal is to transform the future of government service delivery by connecting systems in a way that reduces friction, frustration, and delay.

As the nation moves through the recovery phase, data and digital services must continue positively impacting Australians' lives. At ServiceNow, we are ready to do the work that needs to be done: to connect our people to the services they need and help government harness and unlock the power of data.