Effectively managing the technology needs of more than 5,000 city employees, including employees that utilize technology in the field, requires the right combination of people, processes, and technology.
Business Systems Manager Dusty Borchardt said Oklahoma City has a top-notch IT team and well-defined processes, but the city government lacked an IT Service Management (ITSM) platform that would allow it to become a fully mature IT organization… that is, until they migrated to a new service desk platform that was easier to use and administer.
Eliminating the “Tickets Abyss”
Before this change (to TeamDynamix), Oklahoma City was using a ticketing application that gave employees very limited visibility into the status of their service requests. Employees had to be connected to the city network to create and update service tickets, which was inconvenient for IT technicians working remotely. In addition, services that required the completion of routine tasks by multiple groups within IT had to be manually routed by employees.
The new service desk platform has brought more efficiency to IT service for city employees. Oklahoma City has built a self-service portal to meet employees’ IT needs more effectively.
Self-Service Portals Help Drive Visibility & Quick Results
Now, city employees can initiate a service request from wherever they are using their phone or any other internet-connected device. Employees have more visibility into the status of their requests, and IT managers have comprehensive insight into how their department is doing. Borchardt and his team are continuing to expand the use of TeamDynamix and look forward to improved project management tools and more effective allocation of IT resources once PPM is fully implemented.
“The feedback we’ve gotten is that everyone loves TeamDynamix,” he says. “This is the first IT Service Management platform we’ve implemented that everyone loves to use.”
Gaining Greater Efficiency
With about 100 people providing IT services for more than 5,000 city employees, the IT department needs to work efficiently. TeamDynamix has allowed them to do so by streamlining the delivery of IT service through automated workflows. “TeamDynamix has brought simplicity to our operations,” Borchardt says.
Using tools within the platform, Oklahoma City IT staff have created a self-service portal linked to an expanding knowledge base. City employees can find answers to common problems and frequently asked questions within the knowledge base, and if they can’t resolve their own issue, they can submit a service request through the portal. Based on the nature of the problem they describe; their request is routed automatically to the appropriate IT team for a response.
“Our goal is that use of the self-service portal will continue to grow, reducing our call volume and emails to the IT service desk,” Borchardt says.
Automated workflows also ensure that important tasks aren’t overlooked when IT staff are busy. For instance, when new city employees are hired, there are many steps in the onboarding process. With TeamDynamix, the entire workflow can be initiated with a single service request that is routed to the various departments automatically. The same is true for requesting purchases and managing IT contracts.
“Before TeamDynamix, we had employees emailing requests directly to our administrative group within IT, and that was causing some issues,” Borchardt says. “Sometimes requests would fall through the cracks, and months would go by without anyone noticing.”
The Benefits of Deeper Insight
Greater efficiency is one key benefit that Oklahoma City IT staff have realized from using TeamDynamix. Deeper insight into IT operations is another.
The dashboards and reporting capabilities within the platform help IT leaders identify trends and patterns that allow them to make better decisions. For instance, leaders can see how much time various tasks are taking, or which service categories are getting the most requests, so they can allocate limited resources more effectively.
‘Fantastic’ Implementation with Strategic Knowledge Transfer
Getting up and running with TeamDynamix took careful planning. “Before we got started, we spent time defining our service catalog so we could implement with the appropriate structure in mind,” Borchardt says. “We wanted to get this right because we knew it would serve as the foundation for everything we are trying to accomplish.”
Borchardt describes the implementation process itself as “fantastic.”
“We worked side by side with the TeamDynamix team to configure the system. The TeamDynamix consultants taught us every aspect of the platform as we progressed through the system setup,” he explains. “This helped us understand not only how to use it, but more importantly, how to think about the system strategically. It was an immediate transfer of knowledge on how the system works across all areas.”
Using TeamDynamix has helped Oklahoma City’s IT support teams realize their vision for using industry best practices to improve the delivery of IT services.
“We adopted the ITIL framework more than 15 years ago. We’ve had effective processes in place for a while, but we haven’t had a decent toolset to manage them until now,” Borchardt concludes. “TeamDynamix works better than any system we’ve had previously.”
