The Victorian Emergency Services Authority has implemented ServiceNow to streamline and automate its governance, risk and compliance procedures via the Cloud.
ESTA is the single point for managing calls from the public and the Emergency Service Organisations 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 deployed the ServiceNow Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) solution, an application that automates the business-critical process of measuring and managing legislative policies.
ESTA created a single source of information, 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. The time taken to collect 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 also cut by 67 per cent - to one day from three
While updates to the reports now only take five per cent of the previous time at half a day, instead of five.
ESTA’s head of transformation, Janine Holloway, said ServiceNow had 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,” she said.
“Overall, the solution was strategic to reaching our long-term goal to streamline and create effective and efficient management systems.
ServiceNow managing director, A/NZ, David Oakley, said leading government agencies, such as ESTA, were managing risk and audit via the cloud.
"They are driving greater efficiencies into their operations, demonstrating how committed the organisation is to delivering excellence in its public safety services.”
ServiceNow IT's GRC 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.
