More Than 3 Million Sign Up to NSW's Unified SSO Portal

The Objective

Service NSW, an organization within the New South Wales (NSW) government, was established to make it easier for NSW residents and businesses to access government services. Services covering business and trade matters, life events, housing/property, and more were being offered through siloed and stand-alone government shopfronts, typically requiring in-person visits. The citizens of New South Wales demanded easier and more online access to government services, as well as a single point of contact.

Service NSW was tasked to initiate a digital transformation and customer experience improvement program. Its goals were to introduce business interoperability across agencies, digitize 70% of transactions and enable citizens to access services from anywhere at any time.

The Challenge

The NSW government-operated numerous web portals and backend legacy systems across a number of agencies and with limited consistency from a customer’s perspective. Customers had to work with numerous agencies and systems in order to access systems and gain access to services, this resulted in working with many agencies and remembering multiple usernames and passwords, or actually visiting agencies to obtain services.

Service NSW set out to provide a one-stop-shop for citizens and businesses, consolidating access to 250 different government agencies and departments for more than seven million citizens. Of course, users’ privacy also had to be maintained, and highly sensitive data needed to be secured.

The Solution

Versent configured and deployed the Ping Identity Platform, which was the scalable and flexible solution Service NSW was looking for. Its broad standards support allowed for out-of-the-box, rapid integration with Service NSW’s existing technology, like Salesforce and Drupal.

PingFederate, Ping’s full-featured federation server, was deployed to authenticate and authorize interactions with agency microsites and the Service NSW API. Calls from the API link back to the central identity system, ensuring the user is authorized to access the information or transaction they’re requesting.

On the customer-facing side, citizens authenticate via a single sign-on experience and securely access multiple agency services with just a few clicks from the landing page. Innovative proof of identity (POI) functionality is enabled to support a variety of business rules and to support higher-risk transactions. For example, during the submission of an NSW Police minor crimes report, the citizen’s identity is validated to match the transactional risk and agency business process against information from trusted a trusted third party, such as date of birth, driver's license number, or other data.