Ranked as the second most populated city in the State of Michigan, the city and combined metropolitan area have a population of over 1.35M. For decades, the City had onsite IT support staff with over 40 people at its peak due to the need for highly specialized professionals. Budget constraints compelled the City to move to a competitively bid IT Managed Services contract, supported by on-premises contract staffing. While this reduced the number of people, it still required the City to have additional support contracts in place and provide oversight support. In 2015, the City issued a competitive RFP for Information Technology as a Service (ITaaS). The vendor would be measured by SLAs for delivery of services.
Fixed price IT support in the following areas:
The City faced increased competition for technical skills due to major employers in the area and continued budget constraints. In addition, they needed a vendor to assist with long-term capacity, availability, and security planning to keep the City’s systems current and functional.
The City faced challenges in two main areas. First, how to compete with major employers in the area for quality technical resources. Second, how to reduce IT costs while maintaining a staffed IT program aligned to industry best practices that can scale up and down as needs require.
Under the ITaaS model, Dewpoint provides day-to-day support through a combination of local and remote technical professionals, giving the City a predictable and consistent cost of service delivery while bringing in additional resources for short-term projects, major upgrades, or emergencies. Furthermore, the ITaaS model provides these further benefits:
All aligning to the City’s objectives and focusing on continually improving IT services and better serving constituents.
Continuous Improvement Journey – the IT journey started with transformation by moving to ITaaS, focusing on implementing standards and industry best practices like ITIL and NIST across City leveraged platforms. The next step was implementing a three-year project to refresh the City’s network. By engaging Dewpoint’s network architects and engineers, the City was able to provide a refresh plan that brought its infrastructure up to standards but also aligned with industry roadmaps and future technologies to position the City to continue to improve.
The COVID-19 pandemic created challenges for every IT support organization as the workforce and services transitioned from physical to virtual. The ITaaS model not only allowed the City to staff up temporarily to meet the organization’s needs, but because of the work to align the City’s IT infrastructure to industry best practices and modern concepts, very little was required to get the City’s workforce mobile and maintain services.
Contract Expansion – the original contract included the City’s Technology and Change Management Department’s IT operations. Due to the success seen since its origination, the contract has been extended to include the City’s Water Department (GIS, Desktop and application support), Police Department (Desktop and application support), and Parking Department (Mobile GR) (GIS, Data analytics and desktop support).
Significant Projects – although we have completed numerous projects to improve overall IT, two critical projects include:
Client Satisfaction – measure client satisfaction in two ways – through meeting SLAs and a client satisfaction survey (CSAT) evaluating our service desk (end-user) support. We have met all the SLAs during the contract term and continue increasing our CSAT scores.
Key Statistics