As state and local governments continue to modernize, many are making the switch to codeless service management platforms that can integrate with automation tools like iPaaS. Not only do these types of tools offer great flexibility, but they also often have a lower total cost of ownership. Here are two stories from local governments who recently made the switch.
City of Avondale Leverages Portal, Automations Across Departments for Better, Faster Service
The TeamDynamix Enterprise Service Management (ESM) platform plays a critical role in helping multiple branches of the City of Avondale, Arizona, government work better together. With a more efficient organization, the city can respond to citizens’ needs faster and more effectively, and by leveraging a single portal with automated request routing and workflows, the team can be more responsive and transparent with citizens.
“Before, people would have to call or email our help desk with their service requests,” says CIO Jeff Scheetz. “However, now with the portal, IT has been able to create workflows and automation, rather than managing the many email and ticket requests. The workflow ensures that the requests are handled efficiently and provides additional reporting capabilities. Before, it was hard to prioritize tasks without a full view of what was going on.” In just a little over a year, Scheetz and his staff transformed the delivery of IT service for the city using the TeamDynamix platform.
In addition, supercharged ESM is helping to improve interdepartmental collaboration. For example, onboarding new employees is a multistep process that used to be quite cumbersome. Once new hires have completed all of the paperwork required by HR they need network privileges from IT, they have to be added to the city’s payroll system, and they need access to the building from Facilities.
This process used to involve a lot of paper shuffling, and it could take a while to complete. Now, the entire workflow can be initiated with a single service request form that is routed to the various departments automatically.
“We can make sure we’re addressing all of our needs expeditiously,” Scheetz said. Having an automated system that keeps everyone on the same page has made working remotely much easier for city employees during the pandemic. Although in-person operations have resumed, “if someone needs to work from home, we can easily accommodate that now,” he said.
TeamDynamix has enabled employees to streamline city operations and deliver better service to Avondale residents. The system’s versatility has added a tremendous amount of value to the city government. “Everybody has a limited staff,” Scheetz says of municipal organizations. “Having a system like TeamDynamix makes a huge difference.”
Pima County Reducing Toil, Supercharging ITSM with Automation
With more than 1 million residents living in Pima County, top-notch service delivery is essential for the Pima County government, and that means investing in the right tools and retaining employees as the county moves through its digital transformation.
For Mark Hayes, information technology leader at Pima County, much of the digital transformation work starts in IT, “TeamDynamix is a place where we are really trying to kickstart and accelerate the ideology that automation with the right tools can bring value not just to IT, but to other departments within our organization. We’re starting in IT, so that they can see the possibilities as we move forward with our digital transformation and expand outside of IT.”
Pima County made the switch to TeamDynamix for IT Service Management (ITSM) after using a different system for the last 10 years. Traditionally, the county has taken in tickets through email, phone and a service catalog with base-level triage, but with TeamDynamix in place, they will be able to leverage self-service and automation to better serve its citizens and reduce the drain on employees and resources.
Aside from performance issues with their old ITSM platform, Hayes said the county is looking at ways to combat both resource drain and employee burnout with their new ITSM in place.
“Prior to TeamDynamix, we didn’t have the ability to automate things and build workflows to do things that eliminate toil and redundancy for our employees,” Hayes said.
And with many organizations struggling to maintain or hire new talent, especially in IT, this was critical for the county, “People feel so much more empowered and have so much more worth when they are doing things that are intellectually rigorous and challenging versus when they are just repeating the same mechanical actions over and over and over with very little thought,” Haye said.
“Our ITSM is our entry point to our entire IT organization, and we want our employees to graduate out of this area into other roles within our organization – network technicians, client services, desktop technicians, developers and project managers,” he continued. “If all they’re doing is handling tickets and doing the same mundane, manual tasks over and over that’s not particularly great training. So, investing in tools that allow our employees to engage in meaningful work is something that’s important to us as an overall IT organization.”
With TeamDynamix now in place, Pima County is looking to automate and integrate as much of the manual ITSM processes into workflows as they can.
“That’s something the organization is really just starting to comprehend as a vision that we want to get to overall,” Hayes said referring to automation. “My goal and hope is to make sure people understand the possibilities of workflow beyond just getting approvals routed because that’s all that we really do today.”
Beyond automating ITSM tasks and processes, Pima County is also investing in TeamDynamix iPaaS – integration platform as a service. With iPaaS, the county is looking to integrate systems beyond just IT to automate processes like onboarding and offboarding employees.
“We are starting small, hoping to use automation to take tickets and automatically deploy software to endpoints, to onboard and offboard users with Active Directory and distribution groups,” Hayes said.
When it comes to onboarding new hires, the county’s goal is to have new employees arrive on day one with everything they need to get to work, “You don’t need to waste so much time when it comes to onboarding,” Hayes said. “It really is such a sour experience for a new hire to come in, in this day and age, and sit around for three days waiting on their computer to show up. We need to get out of that mode and iPaaS is going to help us do that.”
In addition, using iPaaS to automate offboarding will save countless hours for a process that is normally very manual and heavily audited as Pima County is a government entity.
“As a government organization we get audited by the state every year and they want to know what these stale accounts are doing sitting here,” Hayes said. “Offboarding is currently a very manual process – having to review the list from HR of people who are no longer employed with us and manually revoking their privileges from all the different systems and software and disabling their accounts. There’s absolutely no reason for that to not be automated. iPaaS is going to help us a lot with this and save us time.”
