City of Geneva relies on ServiceNow to modernize their business applications on a single platform
The approximately 200,000 residents of the city of Geneva have felt the effects of the corona pandemic with full force, especially in the cultural sector, which is important for Geneva. ServiceNow CSM was introduced to speed up the processing of city government and citizen applications.
by Tom Royston, head of the IT department of the city of Geneva
Almost 8 percent of all jobs are in the creative sector, which according to a study by the Geneva University of Applied Sciences (HEG) from 2014 to 2016 is the second largest branch of the economy. Therefore, during the pandemic, the city decided to award grants totaling two million Swiss francs to artists. The city government asked the IT department to develop a portal for applying for and awarding grants, called ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM).
ServiceNow CSM was the latest innovation introduced in the city government’s IT system. The platform brings together key applications and features that can be expanded as needed. The product was introduced to speed up the processing of applications from the municipality and citizens. The applications can now be sent directly to the various departments of the city. It’s a powerful modern strategy to make it easier for citizens to communicate with the city using technology. The portal was originally only intended for the cultural sector.
It was developed within five weeks as a short-term SaaS solution. However, this simple and practical system has received incredibly positive feedback from applicants, caseworkers and the Geneva Department of Cultural Services.
Driving digital transformation
Since May 2021, artists have been able to submit their projects via the portal, with each application being prepared by 15 experts. These experts can log into the secure ServiceNow back office using two-factor authentication, assess applications individually online, and select grantees.
Accelerate projects
From a technical point of view, the ServiceNow tools are project accelerators for us. We can concentrate on our actual tasks and use the existing functions of the platform. This allows us to provide new services to our internal customers and residents much faster. Since we only need a few components for this, the maintenance requirement is also much lower. We can react much faster now.
And instead of developing and maintaining countless systems for different services internally, the IT team has a standard platform on which the automated solutions now have far fewer components that require maintenance. This allows IT to act much faster.
Our next project is to develop a mobile application for our colleagues on the Autobahn. They should be able to take geolocated photos with comments. Depending on the type of damage to public property, they can then send the report to the responsible department via a workflow so that cleaning can be arranged quickly. We have designed about 20 types of reports that we will model and implement with the ServiceNow platform.
“For me and my team in the department for IT and communication systems, ServiceNow is the foundation for our future development”. With the clear dashboard, we can monitor operations much more effectively and with a high degree of granularity. We can automate processes more extensively and faster. And that’s good for the city and its citizens. (ServiceNow/mc)