Essex-based council successfully brings technical services in-house and supports IT transformation with Sunrise ITSM
Sunrise Software, a leading supplier of IT service management (ITSM) software, today announced that Tendring District Council in Essex is using Sunrise ITSM to support its staff and underpin IT transformation.
The council provides a full range of services to 145,000 residents in the north east of Essex. Covering rural districts, the holiday resorts of Clacton, Frinton and Walton, along with the port of Harwich, its population grows significantly in the summer due to tourism. The service desk supports over 750 staff, including 60 councillors, located across 20 sites.
Tendring DC implemented Sunrise ITSM when returning to an in-house delivery model, after outsourcing IT services for 23 years. Following a full tender process, it selected Sunrise ITSM for three main reasons – a close fit with the council’s requirements, the fact that the solution delivered value for money, and that it provided a cost-effective way to expand as needs grew. Additionally, Tendring had worked with Sunrise previously, when running IT services in-house and during the first ten years of its outsourcing contracts.
Using Sunrise provides Tendring Council with a platform for the future. The past three years have been extremely busy for the council, with enormous change, including an organisation-wide Transformation Programme. Key elements of this have been office rationalisation, customer service channel shift and greater investment in IT, including the implementation of new unified messaging services via Skype for Business and supporting greater mobile and remote working. An effective IT service desk is key to underpinning this transformation.
“We see the service desk as IT’s shop window, as it can often be the only direct contact that end-users have with our team,” said Judy Barker, Information Governance & IT Services Manager, Tendring District Council. “We therefore wanted to provide an efficient, effective and proactive service when we moved back to an in-house model. Sunrise enables us to successfully deliver a good quality of service to our customers, helping the council to achieve its objectives and in turn deliver the best possible service to Tendring’s citizens and visitors.”
The council now benefits from a full IT service management platform to support its councillors and staff. As well as handling service desk queries, the 2-level support team provides staff with the ability to raise security concerns and incidents. It receives around 35 incoming calls per day, logged by telephone, email and face-to-face channels. The team is trained to carry out around 20 types of first line fixes, as well as being able to assign more complex queries to two different teams for resolution. Overall, the service desk team, councillors and staff are extremely happy with the solution.
Geoff Rees, Director of Business Services and Sales at Sunrise Software, comments: “For councils of all sizes, technology is at the heart of modern local government. As Tendring Council’s success shows, the IT service desk is vital to underpinning digital transformation and ensuring that the council meets the changing needs of citizens and businesses.”
The IT service management team is now looking at further extending how it uses Sunrise, particularly around setting up change management and deploying self-service. This will allow the team to extend the support it offers in terms of service desk hours, with minimal impact on resourcing.
Additionally, while the council is not currently a heavy user of the ITIL methodology, it is something that the team believes will become more important in the future. Consequently, Tendring has four fully trained ITIL foundation officers. They have already been using the methodology, and the ITIL support within Sunrise, to benchmark functionality over the past three years.
Read a full case study on how Tendring District Council uses Sunrise and more on Public Sector ITSM.
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