Victorian Government Agency Taps ServiceNow to Transform its Audit and Risk Business

SYDNEY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

ServiceNow NOW, the enterprise cloud company, today announced the Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority (ESTA) in Victoria, Australia, is using ServiceNow to transform the organisation's audit and risk business function.

ESTA is the single point for managing calls from the public and the Emergency Service Organisations (ESOs) for emergency response in Victoria. As one of the few emergency communications agencies in the world that manages communications for the full range of emergency service providers including police, fire and ambulance, the company can receive and dispatch around 6,500 calls per day. As such, it's subject to strict regulations and legislative polices that require audit and risk management.

In the past, ESTA's audit and risk processes were manual. Due to the limitations of its legacy reporting system, data had to be copied manually between various Excel spreadsheets to create graphs and statistics for senior level meetings, which often required multiple reviews to ensure accuracy.

To address this, ESTA tapped the ServiceNow Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) solution, an application that automates the business-critical process of measuring and managing legislative policies. With ServiceNow, ESTA created a single source of truth, which automatically collects and validates information from all areas of the business for audits.

ESTA has reduced compliance complexity and streamlined the audit process to ensure the organisation remains compliant with regulations and policies set by authoritative bodies. Specifically, the audit and risk managers have sped these critical tasks since deploying the GRC solution in September 2014:

• Collecting data for auditing was cut by 93 per cent to one day from 15 days;
• Completing reporting for the board and other third-party auditing agencies was cut by 67 per cent to one day from three; and
• Updates to the reports now only take 5 per cent of the previous time at half a day, instead of five.

"ServiceNow has dramatically reduced laborious manual work and data duplication, which was taxing on our staff. Now we can deliver more accurate information and staff can focus on other business critical tasks," said Janine Holloway, ESTA's head of Transformation. "Overall, the solution was strategic to reaching our long-term goal to streamline and create effective and efficient management systems. We are extremely pleased with the results we have received to date, and look forward to seeing further benefits as we continue to utilise the solution across the business function."

"Leading government agencies, such as ESTA, are managing risk and audit via the cloud," said David Oakley, managing director, ANZ at ServiceNow. "They are driving greater efficiencies into their operations, demonstrating how committed the organisation is to delivering excellence in its public safety services."

ServiceNow IT Governance, Risk and Compliance automates the business-critical process of measuring and managing adherence to legislative policies, such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), and industry ITIL framework like Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT). The solution is used to document policies, define the risks of failing to comply, and design controls to enforce policies and mitigate risks. It is also used to schedule control tests to collect compliance evidence and identify failures that need remediation. Further, information from service management processes can be automatically extracted as evidence for compliance audits.

About ESTA

The Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority (ESTA) is the statutory authority providing the critical link between the Victorian community and the State's emergency services agencies. It provides Victoria's 24-hour emergency call-taking and dispatch services, including Triple Zero, for police, fire, ambulance and Victoria State Emergency Service. ESTA also manages the provision of advanced, operational communications for Victoria's emergency services, supporting police, fire, ambulance and VICSES personnel in the field.

About ServiceNow

ServiceNow is changing the way people work. With a service-orientation toward the activities, tasks and processes that make up day-to-day work life, we help the modern enterprise operate faster and be more scalable than ever before. Customers use our service model to define, structure and automate the flow of work, removing dependencies on email and spreadsheets to transform the delivery and management of services for the enterprise. ServiceNow provides service management for every department in the enterprise including IT, human resources, facilities, field service and more. We deliver a ‘lights-out, light-speed' experience through our enterprise cloud – built to manage everything as a service. To find out how, visit www.servicenow.com.

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