Agencies often struggle with aging legacy systems, manual processes, and fragmented monitoring and service tools. Modern IT Service Management (ITSM) provides automation and self-service capabilities to address these challenges.
A combination of technology and methodologies, ITSM describes how IT teams manage the delivery of IT services to customers — from planning, designing and implementing systems to help desks and other ongoing user support. It encompasses everything from mapping out wholesale technology modernization to provisioning laptops to new employees.
Mature ITSM platforms — which include automation, integration and conversational AI — give IT teams powerful tools to manage increasing complexity, growing workloads and rising user expectations.
“If you ask IT leaders what their biggest problem is, they’re going to tell you about resource constraints,” said Andrew Graf, chief product officer at TeamDynamix. “We have hundreds of applications we’re supporting, and no one’s given us any additional head count.”
Here’s a look at how local governments are using modern ITSM to transform user experience and streamline internal processes.
IMPROVING EXPERIENCE WITH AUTOMATION AND SELF-SERVICE
Dusty Borchardt, then-business systems manager for Oklahoma City, credits well-defined processes and a solid ITSM solution for the city’s success in modernizing its IT service desk.
“TeamDynamix has brought simplicity to our operations,” said Borchardt, who became the city’s IT director in June 2025. The platform enables Oklahoma City to streamline IT service delivery through automated workflows.
Besides supporting automation and a new self-service portal, the TeamDynamix platform gives Borchardt and his team deeper insight into the city’s IT operations. Using dashboards and reports, they can identify trends and patterns to make more informed decisions. For example, they can see how much time a task takes, or which service categories get the most requests and allocate their limited resources more effectively.
TeamDynamix helped Oklahoma City’s IT support teams realize their vision for using industry best practices to improve IT service delivery.
“We’ve had effective processes in place for a while, but we haven’t had a decent tool set to manage them until now,” Borchardt said. “TeamDynamix works better than any system we’ve had previously.”
STRENGTHENING COMMUNICATION AND TRANSPARENCY
When it came to doing business with the city of Madison, Wis., residents were asking for two things: better communication and more transparency.
“Our customers wanted transparency, they wanted buy-in, they wanted to have a stake in their request and to be able to provide feedback to us,” said Abigail Ferguson, former customer success manager for Madison’s IT department.
A self-service portal powered by TeamDynamix has provided a road map to transform constituent-facing services. “The IT customer portal specifically has been an ongoing selling point for us to get buy-in internally,” Ferguson said. “The culture was already in place to move forward and embrace a more transparent approach to service management and delivery.”
This readiness for change powers continuous improvement in the city.
“As we started to implement [TeamDynamix] we’ve had good feedback from our help desk on what would be better for customers to submit through the portal or resolve through self-service,” Ferguson said. “Our customers want to be able to participate, and every time we get feedback from our customers our user experience gets better, and we’re doing our jobs better.”
AUTOMATING EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING
Pima County, Ariz.’s goal is to give newly hired employees everything they need to be productive on day 1.
“You don’t need to waste so much time when it comes to onboarding,” said Mark Hayes, who was the county’s information technology leader until his retirement in January 2024. “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.”
Pima County is using its TeamDynamix ITSM platform to automate employee onboarding and offboarding processes.
“We are starting small, hoping to use automation to take tickets and automatically deploy software to endpoints, to onboard users with Active Directory and distribution groups,” Hayes said.
Along with speeding up onboarding, Hayes said automation will streamline employee offboarding, transforming a process that is slow and heavily audited.
“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, 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.”
GETTING STARTED WITH ITSM
Implementing a modern ITSM solution requires careful planning and change management skills. IT leaders should take the following steps:
Understand current ITSM maturity. Conduct an enterprisewide assessment to discover gaps in automation, integration and user experience. Include stakeholders from key departments to identify pain points and opportunities for automation and integration. “Tying ITSM changes to recognized business problems is the most important thing — and all organizations have them,” Graf said.
Prioritize high-impact initiatives. Use findings from your maturity assessment to identify processes that deliver immediate ROI. Simple but organization-spanning solutions, such as automating password resets or employee onboarding and offboarding, demonstrate the power of ITSM with automation and build support for deeper change.
“When you fix those issues, people rejoice, and you have the credibility to solve a few more,” Graf said, adding that an incremental approach to modernization helps organizations and their workforces adjust to change. “Most organizations try to boil the ocean, but it’s really hard to evolve the culture that quickly.”
Leverage technology for rapid deployment. Use no-code capabilities and prebuilt integrations to roll out automated workflows quickly, reinforcing the benefits of improving ITSM. Integrating conversational AI can help maximize impact, but it should be combined with workflows that automatically resolve issues.
“A lot of times chat just finds an article. It’s more like a glorified search,” said Graf. “When you combine chat with automation and integration, it can actually solve the problem. That’s what conversational AI can — and should — do.”
Learn more about how your agency can use modern ITSM — with automation, integration and conversational AI — to strengthen performance and reliability and transform constituent interactions.
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