- Washington State developed an app on the ServiceNow platform to help it manage its response to the coronavirus crisis faster and more efficiently.
- ServiceNow is making that app and other new tools available for free to any government agency in any part of the world.
- The apps make it possible for organizations to coordinate emergency responses, and track employees who may have been exposed to the virus.
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Washington, one of the areas hardest-hit in the coronavirus crisis, came up with an app on the ServiceNow platform to coordinate the work of its 1,800 health department employees faster and more efficiently. ServiceNow is a $54 billion cloud computing company that helps its customers automate common, repetitive tasks.
Now, ServiceNow and Washington are making that app available to any public agency in the world to help them deal with the coronavirus crisis. ServiceNow is also giving them access to new tools geared to helping public agencies and large organizations better coordinate responses to the pandemic.
"They had made that application on their own using ServiceNow," ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott told Business Insider. "The innovation is so exciting that we said hey, look, all government entities should be using this app."
The coronavirus spread quickly in Washington where some of the early mass infections and deaths were reported a few weeks ago.
Callie Goldsby, deputy chief information officer of Washington's Health Department, said the agency built an app on the ServiceNow platform that made the work of their teams easier and faster.
"It cuts down on the additional manual data entry support that's needed by the resource team," she told Business Insider. "We were able to reduce the amount of email that they have to hand generate, we reduce the errors in those emails going around. And we're able to quickly scale up people and get them activated in multiple locations."
ServiceNow said it has also come up with new apps geared to helping government agencies and big organizations better respond to the coronavirus crisis, including one that allows employees to let their work know "that they are self-quarantined and when the employee will return to work, and provides workflow support for the employer."
Another makes it easier for a company or an organization quickly determine other people who might have been exposed to an employee who has been diagnosed with an illness.
"Think about an emergency self-report, where the employee is actually reporting that they're not feeling well and they were exposed to somebody who has the coronavirus and essentially go into quarantine," McDermott said.
"If you think about exposure management, they would also want to identify other employees who might have also been infected by the contact with other workers…Once you have real time visibility, you know that you're actually doing what you're supposed to do, which is save lives."
The app developed by Washington State will be freely available indefinitely to any government agency globally, including those that are not ServiceNow customers.
The other apps will be available to any company or government agency worldwide, also including those that are not ServiceNow customers, free of charge until September 30.
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