Success Story
City Services Delivered
to all Citizens
Benefits of the edgeTI-Powered Digital City Services
What difference has the City Services approach made?
City managers saw significant advances in key performance indicators(KPIs). Clear visualizations communicate the progress and
then indicate what to focus on next, such as Mean Time to Repair (MTTR).
• 2 – 3 hours to investigate and manage incidents reduced to one hour on average
• Major incidents that lasted up to 4 hours at least once a quarter, were no longer major
• Improved service availability 60 – 90% across services
• Increased hotline capacity by additional 7,757 calls.
Avoidable issues negatively effect the experiences
of citizens and visitors
For one large US city, a focus on Integrated Service Management to provide end-to-end visibility control and automation of city services became essential – highlighting its ability to address these challenges. City commissioners and IT staff were specifically concerned with service levels for 29 critical city services used by millions of citizens.
Smarter City Objectives
Make it easy for city residents to determine eligibility for health and human service benefit programs with an online screening tool
Fuse geographic information system to support emergency response and planning operations
Introduce online payment systems for tickets, taxes, utilities, and other city services
Provide citizens with fast and easy access to information and non-emergency services via city hotline
Share information and increase work efficiency for the city’s nearly 300,000 employees with community space and tools
Improve public safety with data-sharing service to cross-share criminal investigations, trial preparation, and case follow-ups
Modern Cities are Filled with Generations of Technology
Given the complexity of this infrastructure, it was difficult for the support staff to diagnose issues and find the root cause of problems to proactively identify affected services. The information gaps increased outages and eroded the confidence of citizens. It also increased the costs associated with answering the surge of calls from employees and citizens.
The foundation of these services is an incredibly heterogeneous infrastructure spanning hundreds of agencies and operational teams with more than 400 servers, 100,000 network devices, 500 database instances, and 60,000 telecom circuits.
By moving to an integrated service model the city gained the end-to-end visibility to make sense of real-time information. Then control and automate the responses needed to deliver high-quality, uninterrupted services despite tight budgets and headcount constraints.
Real-time server, network and application information along with configuration and asset information are automatically collected and fed into service model dashboards that show the health of services and underlying infrastructure.
The ability to identify trends based on the number and severity of problems for each asset class helps IT staff predict and prevent service-impacting problems.
To evolve with citizen expectations, the city needed to establish a delivery model that allows IT staff to identify recurring problems and initiate proactive measures to prevent further disruptions and outages.
Creating a Smarter City Took a Foundation, a Business Case and a Single Point of Control
Previously, each sercer, application and network team used point monitoring tools. The foundation consolidated systems, network and application alerts laid the foundation. Once real-time data was aggregated, real discussions about moving to a service framework were held.
To build a case, the city started reaching out to several vendors regarding the creation of service dashboards that brought IT infrastructure Library(ITIL®) best practices to life.
The executive managers in the city knew a long-term perspective was needed but the support wasn’t widespread. By consolidating operations with edgeTI’s Single Point of Control, visualizing what was possible helped the remaining stakeholders across city agencies.
“We were monitoring the bits and pieces of our core services, but we didn’t have the end-to-end visibility for service modeling and tracking SLA performance. This meant more calls, higher MTTR(Mean Time to Repair), and extended outage durations.”
– Network Monitoring Manager, Large US City
