Switching to the cloud has lowered wait times, increased visibility and freed up resources at Stockport Council

The SMBC service desk gets about 5,000 tickets a month, and going online has saved time for customers and agents

Like many local government bodies across the UK, Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council (SMBC) has a significant installed base of legacy technology. In the past, that also translated into legacy thinking - but the Council is on a journey to refresh its systems and its approach to IT.

Dan Hollands is the IT service desk manager at SMBC. Although much of his career has been spent in the public sector, at organisations including the Science Museum and the Metropolitan Police, he is applying his private sector experience at firms like the Louis Vuitton Group to his current role.

Trying to get the Council thinking in "a more private sector way" has been "a real challenge," he says, but things have been changing:

"The workforce now is a lot more fluid…[and] we're able to move people around more easily. It's never going to quite the same, but [SMBC] is moving a little bit more towards the private sector [way of working]."

Our system was so complex… It just wasn't fit for purpose any more

A major project has been upgrading the service desk to use Freshservice, an entirely new system that replaced Marval.

"We'd let it get out of date," says Hollands. "We'd never applied any updates to it, or seen any of the more recent versions of the product.

"Our system was so complex - you couldn't get any data from it. It just wasn't fit for purpose any more. That became obvious from about a month in. It was clear that I wasn't able to really tell how we were doing or what we were doing."

After meeting several vendors, Hollands and his team chose to move forward with Freshservice, which they could use to enable self-service.

"We didn't have enough staff to deal with every single ticket within an SLA, so we wanted to push self-serve more, and we wanted to get better data on the ticket that was coming in; as it came in we wanted to have all of the information available for us to do the job, not to have to go backwards and forwards to a user to ask more questions.

"Because that was the big driver for it, we felt that the UI was one of the most important things, and that's why we went with it. It was very easy to set up and get out there for the users, and cost-wise it was where it needed to be."

Freshservice now routes service desk tickets directly to the correct team, based on the information that a user gives when filing it.

As well as self-serve, the service desk team wanted to adopt automation. This is perhaps more important in the resource-limited public sector than it is in private industry: government austerity is a big challenge for Hollands.

"We get 5,000 or so tickets coming in a month, and we need to have the staff to be able to resolve them all. We need to have the resources in place to get users to self-serve, or we need to be a lot slicker with our automation."

I was working blind and we were trying to make decisions based on what we believed to be the case

After WannaCry ("It certainly focused the mind a little bit!") last year, the service desk team rolled out several new automations. One is designed to handle emergencies: if a user ticks the bespoke ‘major incidents' field, "a whole series of events go off and email various heads of service and senior managers in IT." Others will track and report on filed security incidents.

The tracking and reporting features and analytics tools of Freshservice have hugely increased visibility in the SMBC systems: a big change from the Marval days.

"We couldn't get any real data from our old system, so I was working blind and we were trying to make decisions based on what we believed to be the case. Now, using the analytics tools... I can break it down by team, by ticket type, by priority, by time of day: anything I want, really… It's given us a better understanding of our workload."

The reaction to the new system, which is cloud-based using AWS, has been very positive. Users raise about 70 per cent of service desk tickets through the online portal, which has only been live for about 10 months - a big shift from the old system, and something that Hollands calls "a massive positive."

SMBC plans to continue its digitisation journey, with a move to Office 365 and Sharepoint. That is going to impact the service desk, but Hollands is undeterred: he is already planning to integrate Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager and the existing Cisco phone system into Freshservice.

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