Smarter Government: Santa Monica Eases Citizen Interactions with City Hall - StateTech Magazine

When the pandemic unopen down galore authorities offices successful March 2020, residents could nary longer physically interact with authorities employees successful galore cities, including Santa Monica, Calif. The Santa Monica metropolis manager turned to the municipality’s CIO for a solution to boost national services online.

Santa Monica CIO Joseph Cevetello knew that the metropolis already had a almighty instrumentality that could help.

“I placed my bets connected definite platforms, and 1 of those platforms is ServiceNow,” Cevetello says. “ServiceNow is simply a fantastic level that’s utilized passim industry. It’s utilized by Fortune 100 companies, governments, university, nonprofits, you sanction it. So, we had already had that successful place.”

“I realized that we had a workflow petition infrastructure already successful place, and that we were utilizing this for interior services wrong the city,” helium adds. “I thought, we person this full workflow engine, this platform, truthful however astir I exposure that to the end-user customer, to our citizens.”

Santa Monica CIO explains however ServiceNow produced the city's mobile app.

ServiceNow Helped Quickly Establish Citizen Services

Cevetello reached retired to ServiceNow and explained his situation and his thinking. The solution rapidly made a difference.

“ServiceNow wholly stepped up,” helium says. “They were amazing, and that’s wherefore they’re an astonishing vendor.”

ServiceNow helped Santa Monica by taking attraction of back-end improvement to empower Cevetello to activate the IT work absorption bundle for the public. With the assistance of a bundle developer, Cevetello produced a mobile telephone app that tied into ServiceNow. In 4 months, Santa Monica had a palmy app that could tract national requests, enabling residents to interact with the metropolis virtually. 

Anyone tin download the app, which has geospatial awareness. When individuals are successful Santa Monica, they tin marque 311 requests done the app. They tin petition trash removal, infrastructure repair, effect to a nonemergency concern and different services, and they tin adhd photographic grounds to their requests by taking photos with their phones done the app.

A Santa Monica 311 lawsuit work squad subordinate instantly receives submitted requests and rapidly routes them to the due metropolis agency. 

“It’s the aforesaid infrastructure, and it’s the aforesaid strategy that creates the request. So, the idiosyncratic who created the petition tin spot the enactment being done and erstwhile it’s implicit successful existent time. City unit tin instrumentality a photograph to amusement the enactment is cleaned up, and the idiosyncratic who created the petition tin spot that, adjacent the incidental and permission america feedback,” Cevetello says.

EXPLORE how states and cities deploy ServiceNow for IT work management.

Online Services Reduce Physical Visits to Government Offices

Typically, galore cities support a 311 work app that is abstracted from the web that routes requests. So, citizens bash not person the restitution of seeing enactment successful progress, and their requests whitethorn adjacent bent successful the app without resolution.

“Now, it’s each 1 system,” Cevetello says. “You person the app; you unfastened the request. That aforesaid strategy is accessed by metropolis staff, either connected their mobile phones done the app oregon done a computer. They execute each the work. It’s seamless, and erstwhile they adjacent the incidental and instrumentality that picture, it gets communicated backmost to you. You cognize successful existent clip that it’s done. It’s radically different.”

Other cities tin travel successful Santa Monica’s footsteps and follow akin solutions, helium adds. With strategical plans and the due resources, municipalities tin tract online services for the convenience of their residents.

“The days of going to City Hall for everything are over,” Cevetello says. “Governments are precise high-friction, but it doesn’t mean that they can’t commencement to go much frictionless, and I deliberation that’s truly what apps similar the City of Santa Monica app are each about.”