It’s not a new problem, but the pressure has intensified. Residents expect faster, more responsive services. Leadership expects modernization. And the budget? It’s likely the same or smaller than the previous year.
This is the reality facing public-sector IT teams across the country, and it’s why the conversation around enterprise service management (ESM) and AI has shifted from “interesting to consider” to “necessary to survive.”
The good news: The path forward doesn’t require a massive workforce, a massive budget or a team of developers.
THE PERFECT STORM FACING LOCAL GOVERNMENT IT
Before exploring solutions, it’s worth naming the problem clearly, because too many agencies are still treating these pressures as isolated nuisances rather than a systemic challenge.
Staffing constraints and budget limitations are two of the biggest hurdles facing state and local agencies today. When agencies can’t fill open positions, they often surrender those head count slots entirely just to meet operational spending requirements. The team gets smaller while the workload stays the same or grows.
Weston Pay, chief technology officer (CTO) of Lake Oswego, Ore., knows this reality firsthand. “Even with a large team, there’s always staffing concerns,” he said, “and budget is always a constraint.”
And for IT teams supporting public safety infrastructure, the stakes are even higher: “We serve public safety, and so there’s a lot of pressure there regarding quick turnaround and efficiency and maintaining the systems that support the public safety infrastructure,” Pay explained.
Aside from budgets and staffing, another factor leading to government gridlock is manual process inefficiency. Studies show that 58 percent of IT professionals spend the equivalent of two months or more every year on toil. These are the routine, repetitive tasks that provide no strategic value and could be automated.
The downstream effect on workforce health is severe: 89 percent of IT professionals cite frustration with unautomated manual work as a contributing factor to attrition.
Agencies find themselves in a vicious cycle, losing staff in part because the work environment is exhausting, and then struggling even more without the people they need.
For local governments, this isn’t an abstract workforce trend. It’s a daily operational reality that affects everything from how fast a permit gets processed to whether a police officer’s body armor is properly tracked.
ONE CITY’S ANSWER: THE NO-CODE, UNIFIED PLATFORM APPROACH
Pay has served as CTO for Lake Oswego since 2019 — a tenure that started just months before COVID-19 upended everything. His team of eight supports a city of roughly 40,000 residents located just south of Portland. The constraints are familiar. What’s different is the approach.
Rather than build custom solutions for each department or allow departments to find their own disconnected tools — a phenomenon known as shadow IT — Lake Oswego moved toward a unified, no-code platform that extends service management far beyond IT.
The goal was simple, even if the execution required discipline. As Pay put it: “It was important that we had something that would work across departments so that we could simplify things. That’s really what it’s about for us, trying to make it easier.”
The key to making that work organizationally was involving stakeholders from the start. “I involved the organization in the decision,” Pay explained. “We selected the platform together. It’s fairly easy to get buy-in once they can see what it can do.”
That inclusive approach turned what could have been an IT-led mandate into a shared investment, and it meant departments arrived at launch already committed to using the new tool.
WHAT ESM ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE
Enterprise service management is one of those terms that can sound abstract until you see it applied to real departmental pain points. In Lake Oswego, the transformation shows up in concrete, recognizable ways.
- Invoicing and Finance. The old invoicing workflow was a textbook case of unnecessary complexity. As Pay described it: “In the past, somebody would receive an invoice electronically. They would print it out. They might sign it, and then they would put it in an office envelope and go to the finance department. Finance would scan it back in and then put it in the ERP system.” This was, as Pay said, “probably not the best way to do this.” Today, that entire chain is automated. Using the TeamDynamix ESM platform, the digital workflow integrates directly with the ERP, eliminating the paper chase and reducing the margin for human error.
- Public Safety. The police department now uses TeamDynamix as its primary asset management system for tracking body armor, firearms and vehicles. This tracking is something non-technical staff can maintain themselves. “Our police department is honestly using it as their asset management platform,” Pay said. “It’s very simple for them to modify the forms for an asset and add different features that are important to one department versus the next.” Formal request processes for officer training have replaced the informal channels that existed before.
- Legal and Contracts. Contract review over email is a well-known organizational pain point — versions multiply, approvals get buried and nothing is auditable. Pay describes the platform’s value here simply: It helps “bring it out of email, which gets cluttered ... it can just keep all of that on track.” The legal team now has a structured workflow that gives everyone visibility into where a document stands.
None of these improvements required a team of developers to build custom software. These are all features that are part of the no-code TeamDynamix service management platform.
BREAKING THE DEVELOPER BOTTLENECK WITH NO-CODE
One of the most underappreciated barriers to automation in government IT is the dependency on developers. When every workflow change, every new form field, every process tweak requires a ticket and development process, the administrators who know the processes best have no way to fix what they see broken. The backlog grows, and nothing moves.
No-code tools eliminate this bottleneck. In Lake Oswego, non-technical administrators modify workflows, add fields and adjust processes without writing a single line of code. That means the people closest to the problem can fix the problem, on their timeline, without waiting in a queue.
Pay recognized early that keeping this capability broad across the organization was the right strategic call: “I realized very quickly that enterprise service management was probably going to be beneficial to the organization. As we began to plan out our TeamDynamix implementation, the enterprise holistic approach became pretty important.”
This is particularly significant for high-stakes processes like employee onboarding and offboarding. These workflows touch Active Directory, HR platforms and credentialing systems, and the consequences of gaps are serious. A former employee with active credentials is a security risk. A new employee without access on day 1 loses trust in the organization before they’ve even started. Automated workflows that trigger across systems without manual handoffs address both risks simultaneously, and they’re maintainable by the administrators who own the process.
AI THAT ACTUALLY DOES SOMETHING
Chatbots have gotten a bad reputation in government, mostly for good reason. The early generation of conversational tools was little more than a glorified search bar. It would take a question, return a link to a PDF and call it a day. Staff and residents learned quickly it was faster to just call.
The next wave of chat is different. Rather than pointing users toward content, these virtual support agents retrieve and synthesize information from internal knowledge bases, SharePoint sites and documented processes. For Pay, the vision is clear: “We really want technicians to be able to provide information directly in the chat and get the answers they’re looking for right there.”
The focus isn’t only internal. Pay is equally committed to improving the experience for residents too. “On the public side of services, when a citizen comes requesting a service, I would like to make that process as easy for them as possible,” he said.
That resident-first framing is important, and it positions AI not as a cost-cutting tool but as a service quality investment, which tends to land better with elected officials and community members alike.
For a city IT team fielding repetitive internal requests, the capacity math is compelling. Estimates suggest that AI-powered agents can deflect 30 percent to 60 percent of routine service desk tickets, and automation can cut ticket resolution times by 40 percent to 90 percent for the tasks it handles. For an eight-person team supporting an entire city government, that’s a huge efficiency gain.
THE STRATEGIC CASE FOR UNIFIED PLATFORMS
There’s a temptation, especially in resource-constrained environments, to solve problems one at a time with whatever tool is cheapest and most available. The result is a patchwork of disconnected systems that each do one thing adequately and none of them do anything together. Data lives in silos. Workflows don’t hand off cleanly. The IT team spends significant time serving as the manual connector between systems that should talk to each other automatically.
The Lake Oswego model points toward a different strategic posture: Invest in a unified platform, like TeamDynamix, with high enterprise capability and a low total cost of ownership, then extend it across departments as needs arise.
Each new use case, from legal workflows and public safety asset tracking to HR automation, gets built on the same foundation without starting from scratch. The upfront investment pays dividends every time.
For state and local governments facing the next decade of budget pressure, this isn’t just a technology choice. It’s a structural decision about how the organization operates.
GETTING STARTED: PRACTICAL STEPS FOR YOUR AGENCY
The Lake Oswego story offers inspiration and, more importantly, a replicable model. A few principles stand out as broadly applicable regardless of agency size:
- Involve the organization early. As Pay learned, “It’s fairly easy to get buy-in once they can see what it can do.” Demos beat memos. Get stakeholders in the room, show them what’s possible and let adoption follow naturally.
- Start with your highest-toil processes. Identify where staff spend the most time on repetitive, low-value tasks and target those first. The ROI of automation is fastest where the manual burden is greatest.
- Prioritize security-critical workflows. Onboarding and offboarding aren’t just efficiency problems; they’re security problems. Automating these processes reduces risk while also reducing toil, making the case to leadership straightforward.
- Choose platforms that empower administrators, not just developers. The ability for non-technical staff to modify and maintain workflows is a prerequisite for sustainable automation at scale. If every change requires a developer, the bottleneck never goes away.
- Think about AI as a capacity multiplier, not a replacement. The goal isn’t to remove the human element from government service — it’s to free up human capacity for work that genuinely requires judgment, relationships and expertise.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Local government has never had the luxury of wasted capacity. But the gap between what agencies are being asked to deliver and what their current tools and staffing allow is widening. Closing that gap requires more than working harder with the same processes.
The path forward is available, affordable, and doesn’t require an army of developers or a multiyear implementation timeline. It requires the willingness to reimagine how service management works, department by department, workflow by workflow. Cities like Lake Oswego are already doing it. The question for every other agency is: What are you waiting for?
