Fife Council improves service efficiency with Dynatrace

Faster understanding

As a unitary authority, the council is responsible for everything from street lighting and bin collections to social housing, education, and social work services.Like most government organisations, the council relies on a variety of third-party platforms to manage its wide range of services and business functions. Legacy systems are being replaced over time as Fife continues to invest in digital solutions to modernize public services and customer transactions.

Large scale project implementations and systems deployed to thousands of network users can often be hampered by error messages and performance issues. Without effective root cause analysis, sometimes neither the council team nor its service providers can identify the source of the issues to resolve them. Fife turned to Dynatrace for an intelligent observability solution to overcome these issues and accelerate service improvements.

Scott McKenzie, technical specialist, Fife Council explains: “We work in close partnership with all our third-party providers. But when you’re dealing with huge applications linked to lots of other networked systems, and thousands of end-users on a range of devices, it can be really hard to pinpoint the cause of any problems.

Better employee experiences

With Dynatrace, Fife has been able to improve the performance of both desktop case management solutions and mobile applications used by workers in the field.

In some cases, users had complained of performance issues that many employees assumed were to do with poor network performance or mobile signal. Without intelligent observability, it had proven difficult for the council and its service providers to find fixes. McKenzie said: “One issue had been rumbling on for weeks, but we found it instantly with Dynatrace and were able to get it resolved.”

More efficient operations

Dynatrace’s advanced AIOps capabilities have also enabled Fife Council to operate more efficiently. The Dynatrace platform is managed by just one staff member, where the previous approach required up to ten people, who can now refocus their efforts on more value-driving work. McKenzie adds: “Instead of throwing internal resources at a problem for weeks and getting to the root cause eventually, Dynatrace’s AI can point us to the answer instantly. It’s our hope that as Dynatrace becomes more central to the way we operate, we can be more proactive in how we manage user experiences.”

Fife Council’s ultimate goal is for any new tier one application that comes online to be automatically instrumented with Dynatrace for observability. The council also aims to integrate Dynatrace with its IT service management platform, so relevant teams can be automatically alerted to issues, as well as root causes, so they can be resolved before users are impacted.