Raleigh empowers employees to build a people-focused smart city

Empowering change and driving sustainable growth
Home to nearly 500,000 people, Raleigh, North Carolina, is consistently recognized as one of the best places to live in the U.S. With diverse communities, world-class universities, and thriving businesses, Raleigh is a smart city at the leading-edge of innovation and progress.

“Our mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin champions technology to empower change and support sustainable growth,” says Mark Wittenburg, Chief Information Officer, City of Raleigh. “The results are clear: Raleigh is now one of the fastest growing cities in the country.”

Raleigh relies on technological innovation to connect people and systems so city employees can efficiently deliver quality government services that meet the changing needs of a rapidly growing population. “Raleigh is a smart city because of its people,” explains Beth Stagner, Assistant IT Director, City of Raleigh. “We leverage the latest technology to cost-effectively deliver excellent services to residents, businesses, and visitors, with an eye towards solving age-old problems such as traffic, parking, and affordable housing.”

Knowing the importance of employee engagement, Raleigh has unveiled an intuitive self-service portal that offers city employees easy access to a wide range of resources, from tracking service desk tickets and onboarding new hires, to reporting workplace incidents and submitting position adjustments, or making physical access requests.

“Raleigh’s ServiceNow portal empowers employees to seamlessly deliver services that allow the city to effectively serve every community and business,” says Stagner. “Processes that previously took hours and involved many teams are now independently completed by employees in minutes.”

Standardizing on ServiceNow
Before implementing ServiceNow, Raleigh operated different IT service desk systems and manually tracked ticket status updates in spreadsheets and email. “Employees had no visibility and would reach out to more than one person for help,” recalls Stagner. “This made it hard for teams to quickly resolve issues and sometimes prevented employees from immediately responding to citizen requests.”

As part of the Smart Raleigh initiative backed by the Mayor’s Office, the IT department looked for a secure, automated cloud-based platform that would enable the city to quickly consolidate systems, efficiently manage devices, and cost-effectively build a centralized self-service employee portal.

The organization found that ServiceNow offered out-of-the-box capabilities and integrated flawlessly with existing applications. “ServiceNow helps tax dollars go further, reduces inefficiencies, and uplevels our commitment to Raleigh’s residents, businesses, and visitors,” says Stagner.

By standardizing on ServiceNow, Raleigh replaced six legacy service management solutions and reduced the number of employees in the city’s IT call center from eight to two employees. The remaining six employees now work in other areas where they more directly impact the services provided to Raleigh staff and thus constituents. With an estimated annual savings of $315,000, Stagner attributes the increase in operational efficiency to the self-service portal which makes it easy for employees to submit and track IT requests.

“With IT Service Management Pro, IT Operations Management, and Hardware Asset Management Pro, we’re reducing open tickets by offering new self-service channels, leveraging asset discovery to help maintain the CMDB, and fulfilling requests for new devices such as laptops and smartphones faster,” says Stagner. “Automating and optimizing technology Service Operations enables employees to focus 100% of their time and effort helping the people of Raleigh.”

Stagner also highlights the crucial role Strategic Portfolio Management plays in streamlining and consolidating project tracking across city departments. “Developers, support specialists, and leadership now have a single source of truth for all staff activity,” adds Stagner. “This allows Raleigh to effectively plan and forecast portfolio driven initiatives that tie back to business services offered by IT and the city.”

Streamlining recruitment and onboarding
HR teams also work more efficiently with HR Service Delivery. As Stagner explains, the employee portal automates manual processes, enables cross-department collaboration, and displays detailed status updates on easy-to-understand dashboards.

Perhaps most importantly, ServiceNow auto-populates personnel forms so different teams—such as HR, IT, Facilities, and Payroll—don’t have to enter the same information more than once. “ServiceNow saves employees more than 1,302 hours annually by digitizing key HR forms and automating processes across departments,” says Daniel Boyette, IT Supervisor, City of Raleigh. “This allows Raleigh to shift more resources to building smart city infrastructure and improving city services.”

Since implementing ServiceNow, Raleigh onboards employees and contractors 66% faster, enabling the city to accelerate the time it takes for new employees to start providing city services. “Raleigh prioritizes recruiting new talent to boost quality of life for residents,” says Boyette. “ServiceNow streamlines the onboarding process, enabling us to hire people in weeks, not months.”

Responding to employee requests 24/7
To further improve employee experiences and support requests 24/7, Raleigh operates an interactive chat platform staffed by a ServiceNow-powered virtual agent known as Ral-E. “Ral-E lives on the IT Portal as well as Microsoft Teams and helps employees track service desk tickets, fill out HR forms, and update payroll information,” adds Boyette. “By deflecting basic requests, Ral-E saves time for the requestor and support staff which enables teams to focus their efforts on other assignments.”

Raleigh continuously updates Ral-E with new capabilities and features. “We seamlessly integrated ServiceNow with Microsoft Teams in less than 10 minutes—and transforming Ral-E into a proactive virtual agent was just as easy,” says Boyette. “Future enhancements to Ral-E include the ability to contact employees with event reminders, send service request updates, and automatically transfer people to live agents when needed.”

World-class city, world-class services
ServiceNow empowers Raleigh to build a people-focused smart city that supports sustainable growth. In the future, Raleigh plans to expand its use of ServiceNow to launch a self-service portal for residents, businesses, and visitors. “ServiceNow positions Raleigh at the leading-edge of online citizen services and establishes a solid digital foundation to build a people-focused smart city,” concludes Wittenburg. “With over 300 daily visits, we’re proud that our employee portal is now a popular blueprint for other cities looking to deliver high-quality services more efficiently.”

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