Government Saves Time, Money, and Resources with Improved Help Desk Software

The city of San Mateo, California is witnessing booming growth in both its population and infrastructure development. Since the year 2008, San Mateo has experienced an 8% increase in population, and home sales have jumped a staggering 28%. Consequently, the municipal government of San Mateo is faced with the enormous task of managing and overseeing the recent expansion while operating on an outdated help desk system. Their objective: maintain networks and PCs for 600 users spread across 22 facilities in a diverse and rapidly growing high-tech city. In order to adapt to these challenges, a new help desk alternative needed to be implemented to better serve citizens.

San Mateo did have a help desk system in place prior to this expansion. However, according to Sr. Project Manager Young Vu, “it wasn’t implemented well… the staff [regressed] back to writing tickets on paper. Work orders went missing, and citizens didn’t know if requests were worked on or escalated.” It became apparent that a new help desk system that was easy to implement and would make citizens happy, was necessary. “My number one goal… was to create a situation where our communications with citizens was excellent, where they knew exactly where their requests were.” said Vu.

The City of San Mateo decided to implement a new, more effective help desk software to assist them in accomplishing their objective. Since then, the city’s IT department has seen a great deal of cost savings, primarily coming from the deployment of resources, such as time and manpower. After software utilization, San Mateo reported that an IT inventory project with their Police Department took a week to complete. Had the task been performed manually, it would have taken three months. Their average technician makes $25 – $30/hour, so that is a savings of close to $14,000.

In addition to these cost savings, the improved help desk software offers a much easier navigation system for both citizens and end users, which provides an improved experience all around. The properly configured and utilized helpdesk software has a positive influence on the end users, the government agency, and the city as a whole.

To read more about the success that the city of San Mateo had, download the entire case study.