Cloud

Local Governments Connect Services, Deploy Automation with ServiceNow

IT service management empowers agencies in the public sector to bolster operations.

Stephanie Bishop is a Sales Manager for State and Local Government - Northwest at CDW•G

Government agencies have come to embrace commercial, off-the-shelf products as more practical in today’s fast-paced tech environment. COTS products are quicker and simpler to procure, with little need for extra development. Even the intelligence community, rife with classified and sensitive material, is moving in that direction.

State and local agencies have embraced COTS products, but they also have begun to realize they need customization and plenty of support for these new products. ServiceNow is one of the solutions that can assist agencies in both customization and support.

ServiceNow empowers organizations in the public sector to bolster operations, from tracking data more easily to streamlining incident and problem management.

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ServiceNow Connects Departments on One Platform in Chicago

State and local government customers benefit from a platform that can quickly provision IT services internally to customers — their employees — and externally to citizens.

Chicago Public Schools and the city of Chicago engaged ServiceNow through CDW. The school system created an instance in the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and connected it with CPS. The goal was to enable DCFS to communicate with CPS in a way that’s safe and secure so the two departments could ensure support for teachers and families.

As a result, people who need social services who are connected with CPS can access DCFS services. Thanks to ServiceNow, both students and schools can benefit from resources available through the city thanks to ServiceNow.

EXPLORE: How localities are using federal grants for IT modernization.

ServiceNow Automates Repetitive Tasks in Denver

Government agencies routinely deal with a large volume of data, and laborious or repetitive tasks can quickly eat up time. As a result, solutions that streamline operations while maintaining accuracy and efficiency are valuable to state and local governments.

Automation can help. Agencies can apply ServiceNow’s automation capabilities across a wide range of tasks. The automation engine is designed to integrate with other popular platforms and the capability can be built in with minimal coding.

For example, the city of Denver uses ServiceNow to automate its government, risk and compliance processes. Part of the solution involves making it easier for the city’s vendors to fill out a GRC survey. City administrators can choose among 300 questions to create a survey that includes about 125 of the most relevant questions for each vendor. With this process, the city has reported a 66 percent reduction in survey response time.

“We now get responses back in two weeks or less, instead of six — one third of the time — and ServiceNow automatically scores them for us, so we’re not constantly buried in reviews,” says Information Security Manager Julie Sutton. “Our internal clients get much faster turnaround when they need to onboard a new vendor, and our vendors are far happier as well.”

Denver’s Integration of Additional City Services with ServiceNow

Denver’s ServiceNow solutions have also enhanced its call center experience. With the city’s ServiceNow instance connected to Amazon Connect, information pops up automatically in the calling system.

The reporting and analytics contained in the city’s ServiceNow instance automatically populate in ServiceNow. This saves Denver’s civil servants a lot of time and frustration.

Say I’m a Denver employee; if I call the help desk, my call actually hits Amazon’s cloud resources. All of my user information, housed in an employee profile, is immediately available to the help desk, which doesn’t have to take the time to ask me certain questions — they already have the information.

CDW’s eProcurement system can connect with ServiceNow’s asset management capabilities. CDW can upload hardware information directly to a customer’s ServiceNow asset management system. So, anything that's purchased through CDW will automatically be put into the portal.

This, of course, prepares ServiceNow to connect to any COTS products — a win-win for state and local governments.

This article is part of StateTech’s CITizen blog series. Please join the discussion on Twitter by using the #StateLocalIT hashtag.