Smart Service Management for the Public Sector

In today’s world, traditional IT Service Management (ITSM) just doesn’t cut it. The employees and citizens you support expect fast, reliable service and don’t want to jump through a lot of hoops to get it.

To achieve these service levels (without further draining IT resources and budgets), many organizations are turning to low-code/no-code IT Service Management tools that offer Enterprise Service Management (ESM) baked in with Project Portfolio Management (PPM), and that include robust integration and automation capabilities.

These tools enable both IT and departments outside of IT to engage in something we call smart service management.

With smart service management, the entire organization is connected and interacting in real time – all supercharged by integrations and automated workflows. By using ITSM software that can go beyond the ITIL framework and be used more broadly across the entire organization, you can modernize your service management, reduce the drain on IT and better serve your employees and citizens.

Modern, smart ITSM platforms offer the traditional support for ITIL along with end-user self-service and change and asset management – as they always have. But now also encompasses true enterprise service for groups like HR, marketing, facilities and more – all on a codeless platform.

How Smart ESM Can Enable Digital Transformation in the Public Sector

Smart service management and digital transformation go hand-in-hand, revolutionizing how the public sector operates and delivers value to employees and citizens. With this in mind, the role of Enterprise Service Management is becoming increasingly important in supporting digital transformation as part of a smart service management strategy.

With ESM you can streamline service delivery processes, align tech stacks, improve security and governance over data and APIs, gain better visibility into all the work and projects happening and above all, enhance the user experience.

The core concepts of ESM include:

• Service orientation: Adopting a service mindset that focuses on delivering value to customers by understanding and fulfilling their needs.
• Process standardization: Implementing consistent, best-practice processes across the organization to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
• Automation and integration: Leveraging technology to automate repetitive tasks and integrate disparate systems, reducing manual effort and streamlining service delivery.
• Performance measurement: Continuously monitoring and measuring the performance of services and processes to drive continuous improvement.

The City of Avondale, AZ Achieves Efficiency with Enterprise Service

City governments must serve their citizens effectively, often with limited staff. 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. By leveraging a single portal with automated request routing and workflows, the team can be more responsive and transparent with citizens.

TeamDynamix is helping to improve interdepartmental collaboration too. For example, onboarding new employees is a multistep process that used to be quite cumbersome. This process used to involve a lot of paper shuffling and could take a while to complete. Now, the entire workflow can be initiated with a single service request that is routed to the various departments automatically.

“We can make sure we’re addressing all of our needs expeditiously,” said Scheetz.

TeamDynamix has not only helped streamline workflows and improve communication among city employees; it also provides key insights that help leaders manage their departments more effectively.

“We can see trends and patterns that help us deploy our limited resources in a more intelligent manner,” Scheetz explained.

Leaders can see how much time various tasks are taking, so they can plan better for the future—such as by justifying additional hires or reassigning staff to other projects. Leaders can also see which service categories are getting the most requests, which helps with resource allocation as well as troubleshooting.

“Everybody has a limited staff,” Scheetz says of municipal organizations. “Having a system like TeamDynamix makes a huge difference.”

Pima County, AZ is Reducing Toil with Service Automation

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.

“Before 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. 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.

Hayes offers an innovative viewpoint, “I think the more we can reduce toil within the departments that we support, the more people are going to buy in and understand the value of what we’re trying to achieve. There’s nothing like success to breed more success, and once other departments see the benefits, they’re going to want these tools too.” And it’s that success that IT is starting to realize with TeamDynamix, “We’ve been able to use our success to drive additional headcount in our organization, to do more and better things,” Hayes said.

Beyond automating ITSM tasks and processes, the county is looking to integrate systems beyond 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 and sit around for three days waiting on their computer to show up.”

“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 not to be automated. iPaaS is going to help us a lot with this and save us time.”