Fairfax County Public Schools Make the Grade with Improved Service Delivery

While no one enjoys having the “flow” of their work interrupted by a technology problem, that situation is especially vexing for teachers; a glitch can throw off not just their schedule, but that of the whole class.

So when tech issues do occur, teachers need to be able to report incidents quickly, have confidence that the problem will be fixed promptly, and get back to their students.

Recognizing the challenges in the classroom, the IT staff at Fairfax County Public Schools first moved their services online in 2007. But this early system still relied on manual steps and paper-based approval processes.

As the biggest single line item in most state budgets, public schools are under pressure to “do more with less.” Here’s the story of how Fairfax graduated to a faster, simpler system with Kinetic Data.

The classroom technology teachers rely on has to work. And when something goes wrong, they need a fast, easy way to report the issue so it gets fixed quickly.

For Fairfax County Public Schools—the 10th-largest school district in the nation—the challenges are magnified. With 23,000 employees, nearly 185,000 students and 250,000 IT service requests each year, the magnitude of the challenges for the district’s IT department are greater than most.

The static forms and manual back-end processes of their original online service catalog made for slow response times, while cumbersome service request procedures frustrated teachers and school staff.

Fairfax decided to convert to an enterprise request management system, powered by Kinetic Request. The results?

• IT service fulfillment time has been cut in half by eliminating the need for phone or email follow-up.
• The IT team has doubled the number of services offered through the IT service catalog.
• Approval time has been slashed from days to minutes by moving paper-based approval processes online.

It’s a great success. And in recognition of these amazing results, Fairfax County Public Schools was named a finalist for the 2012 Excellence.gov Award for “effective, efficient and innovative solutions in government.”

What to do next?

• Read the full news release about how Fairfax County Public Schools redesigned its service request and delivery processes.
• Download the white paper Enterprise Request Management: An Overview.
• Contact us to discuss how we can help you automate and accelerate business processes.