How to create a secure, scalable and sustainable future for government

4 min read

Our country is faced with a huge opportunity. With the use of intelligent digital transformation, we have the potential to show the rest of the world how seamless government services can be delivered. But as Australia ramps up to deliver world-leading, technology-enhanced services, our people and businesses need the right technology to embrace this opportunity.

Transformation is a continuous cycle

Today, every business is a technology business. What might have been considered as digital transformation in the past is now at the centre of every aspect of business transformation. In this age of innovation, transformation is no longer a single event or project: it’s a continuous cycle of experimentation, testing, observation, learning, feedback gathering and adaptation. But, more importantly, in order to adjust to this new norm of perpetual business transformation, the human element has to be placed front and centre.

Ultimately, for Government, transformation is about delivering better services and making people’s experiences better. By using their existing service management platforms to connect and enhance their business platforms, ServiceNow customers are accelerating the rate at which they can bring value to both their employees and customers.

There’s no question that these platforms must be agile, flexible and very, very scalable to enable transformation. This is not an experiment. Any digital government transformation initiative affects human lives in significant ways – from the relative simplicity of applying for a travel exemption, to the significant complexity of onboarding a government employee into a national security role.

At all stages, trust is key.

In order to create a solid foundation for any government system that will increase trust, three elements are critical: the platform must be secure, scalable and sustainable.

Secure

Keeping citizens and their data secure is no trivial matter. With the increasing location complexity of hybrid working comes additional requirements for security. Working outside of a traditionally ringfenced security environment increases risk and requires additional vigilance against criminal elements or overseas state actors seeking to take advantage of the new norm.

How can a system secure both data and digital workflows? By securing data online and offline, ensuring relevant access control levels are built into the system, and managing operational, cyber and privacy risks in real-time.

Whenever information is required, stored or shared about people and identities it’s critical to keep things secure – both legally, and because it’s the right thing to do. That’s why secure, scalable, sustainable systems must ensure that all Australian data must at least remain in Australian data centres, and in some cases be given ‘protected’ status.

It comes back to the issue of trust. Vendors providing secure systems must be fully certified. But when trust is established, security improves. Supportive vendors can collaborate on designing regulatory frameworks that are complementary to existing good practice, while mitigating the risk of breaches and incidents and managing cyber-risk frameworks.

That’s why, at ServiceNow, we’re proud to help organisations adopt a better approach to risk. Since our workflows can be used to manage many operations automatically, they can also consider risk in real-time during these processes.

Scalable

Working from home has proven that paper is no longer necessary. The next productivity improvement will lie in the elimination of email from workflows. As organisations increasingly realise that email is just ‘digital paper’, the norm of operating from an email inbox will shift.

The sheer scale of this transformation is enormous, but for many operational tasks, switching to digital forms and workflows will yield huge benefits. However, it will only happen if the technology makes it easy.

That’s why no code and low code development environments and a platform that is based on a single data model and code base is fundamental to any organisations ability to make this transition. This enables the ‘developer’ community to expand rapidly and deliver value quickly, incrementally and rapidly scaling their operational workflows. Work is no longer hidden in emails and spreadsheets. Customers can see how their requests are progressing and employees can focus on getting work done rather than chasing others to find out the status of a request or issue. And by having good quality and meaningful data on how work gets done, we can start to leverage the huge opportunities that are enabled by the rapid advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

By delivering this as a cloud-based solution, new processes can be introduced and scaled rapidly without having to worry about the availability of infrastructure. New developments and enhanced capabilities are made available on a regular basis without worrying about upgrades. And organisations can build once and leverage the solutions across the whole of government.

Sustainable

The dictionary definition of sustainable means ‘able to continue over a period of time’. Therefore, in order to create sustainable, world-leading digital services, Australia needs a secret weapon that can create repeatable methods, approaches, and competencies across government.

For example, what if it were possible to augment and automate manual processes to improve cyber security, safety and trust while building confidence over time? It is.

That’s precisely what the NSW government did when they approached us to build the COVID vaccination system. It’s also what the NSW Police asked us to help with, in order to do real-time risk assessments before proceeding in dangerous circumstances. It’s what WaterNSW did to consolidate, standardise and improve the performance of the disparate systems they used to manage business-critical functions.

We’ve done it around the world, and for government agencies in Australia. And we’re proud to keep iterating, automating and improving services: based on a solid, stable platform that is built once, and continues to evolve over a period of time.

The right platform creates a consistent experience for both employees and customers

Creating a single, unified platform where work is done allows agencies to focus on what matters most in government and creates a consistent experience for employees and customers. How? The answer lies in the power of the Now Platform.

The future will be what we make it. It is possible to transform the way we operate in the digital world in ways we can’t even imagine yet.

Creating intelligent workflows that transform the way people work is the best place to start. Leveraging the power of the Now Platform doesn’t just alter the future of government service delivery: it fundamentally improves security and provides a scalable, sustainable model for improving services.