The City of Los Angeles Housing Department distributes over $325M to residents with custom app development from Ondaro

Results

Custom app development

Avoided the cost of full implementation

Activated long-idle SAM Pro licensing

THE CLIENT

Promoting prosperous communities in Los Angeles

The City of LA Housing Department (LAHD) provides housing services for tenants and landlords in Los Angeles, one of the most competitive markets in the United States. By offering affordable housing, rent stabilization, neighborhood investment, social services, and more, the department seeks to promote livable and prosperous communities throughout the city.

“[Ondaro] comes up with results in a timely manner that we can be proud of. That’s why I will recommend [Ondaro] to others.”

Kim Ly,
Director of Systems, City of LA Housing Department

THE CHALLENGE

Urgent pressure to provide assistance to the community

In March 2020, the LAHD faced unprecedented pressure to provide COVID assistance to tens of thousands of renters across Los Angeles. Because of the scale of the rental housing market and assistance needs within the city, the LAHD needed to quickly develop the largest emergency renters assistance program in the nation.

Unfortunately, application development with ServiceNow App Engine wasn’t something in which the team had expertise. “Customizing applications was new to us within ServiceNow,” says Kim Ly, director of systems at the City of Los Angeles Housing Department. “We had only used ServiceNow for IT requests in the past.”

Behind-the-scenes requirements brought high expectations and special challenges to an already high-pressure and time-sensitive need. Regardless, Ondaro was ready to adapt and pivot to meet the city’s ongoing and expanding requirements.

THE SOLUTION

Custom development with ServiceNow App Engine

ServiceNow recommended Ondaro to the City of Los Angeles to help with building the entire application, introducing them to the power of the ServiceNow App Engine. “Implementing the App Engine with [Ondaro] opened up a whole new world,” says Ly. “Maintaining licenses and keeping up to date with everything takes resources, time, and money. Ondaro showed us that with ServiceNow, modernization, standardization, and consolidation are all possible under a single platform.”

Providing large-scale, comprehensive services to the entire City of Los Angeles was no easy feat, but Ondaro was ready to take on the challenge. They developed the housing assistance app for the LAHD-practically from the ground up-in just months to meet a hard deadline. Additional apps helped provide support to food-insecure Angelenos and assist businesses and a struggling city workforce attempting to comply with “safer at home” recommendations. With emergency rental assistance, Ondaro’s solution enabled Los Angeles to screen tens of thousands of applicants and distribute over $325M in funding to households and communities in need.

What Is Your Favorite Part about Working with Ondaro?

“Seeing results. We meet every week, and I would express my vision on a particular business process workflow. Two days later, the [Ondaro] team has already put everything together for our next steps. They come with solutions that will definitely bring efficiency to our department and value to our ServiceNow investment!”

Long-term, reliable app customization and partner support

After building the emergency rental assistance solution with Ondaro, LAHD knew they had a partner they could rely on for other development projects. “The success of the rental assistance app showed us Ondaro had real-world expertise instead of just putting it on paper,” says Ly. “It was a big project, but they proved to us they knew exactly what we needed and how to help us succeed.”

Through the development of several additional applications, LAHD has found a long-term ServiceNow partnership with Ondaro. “[Ondaro] comes up with results in a timely manner that we can be proud of,” says Ly. “That’s why I will recommend [Ondaro] to others.”

What is ServiceNow App Engine?

ServiceNow App Engine is an enterprise low-code application platform (LCAP) that is used to rapidly develop and establish custom applications. ServiceNow’s LCAP can be used to create applications that require the following:

High performance
High availability and scalability
Disaster recovery
Service-level agreements (SLAs)
Enterprise security
Application usage monitoring
Technical support and training

With ServiceNow App Engine, organizations can bring new applications to market in half the time and at one-third the cost.

ServiceNow App Engine

Let’s Innovate Together!

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