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Fort Myers managed 200+ vendor contracts and met stringent compliance demands with only 1 new hire instead of the 15 requested. The Velentix low-code/no-code ITSM platform delivered high capability without requiring deep technical developers.
Automated onboarding ensures new employees arrive at fully provisioned workspaces with laptops, software, and access configured from their first moment. This creates positive first impressions while providing clear visibility into hiring costs.
Automation can eliminate 2-3 months per year of repetitive tasks like password resets, allowing IT staff to focus on complex work. Customers receive instant service for simple requests, meeting modern expectations for government services.
Industry: Public Sector
End-users: 100,000+
Previous System: Freshdesk
The rapid pace of technological change demands that public sector IT organizations become “future ready.”
Richard Calkins, IT Director for the City of Fort Myers, Florida, recently sat down with Velentix’s Chief Product Officer, Andrew Graf, to talk about how the City of Fort Myers is future-proofing its ITSM.
Velentix offers a powerful, single work management platform designed for managing both IT services and project work, all underpinned by automation and AI, utilizing a low-code/no-code approach.
This approach provides high capability with a low total cost of ownership, as it reduces the need to staff deep technical software developers.
For Calkins and the city, this is critical as mandates from the Florida Department of Government Efficiency have increased pressure on local governments to do more with less.
“Do more with less is the new normal; that is the way everyone has to operate,” Calkins explained. “We had budgets approved for the next fiscal year, and I didn’t get the 15 new employees I requested to be able to fill all the gaps we have; I got one. There’s escalating budget pressure, and everything is more expensive now.”
Government agencies nationwide face intense pressure. A national survey revealed that the top challenges include staffing constraints, budget constraints, lack of automation, and aging infrastructure.
One of the biggest challenges for many local governments, as Calkins explained, is the pressure to keep tax rates low and keep services running (and expanding) with the same amount of, and in many cases less, resources than before.
In addition, everyone expects everything to be online.
“It’s become the ‘Amazonification’ of government,” Calkins said. “Everyone expects things to be online and easy to do, so we are working through how we can accomplish that.”
To address this “Amazonification,” many IT teams are managing and supporting a rapidly growing number of applications.
The City of Fort Myers, for example, has a contract portfolio covering various vendors and platforms that is currently pushing 200 different contracts. This growing portfolio, often involving cloud or SaaS solutions, requires significant work to ensure platforms function together and meet security standards.
In addition to managing technical sprawl, public agencies face strict efficiency and compliance demands.
As mentioned before, the City of Fort Myers encountered an increased focus on efficiency, driven partly by the Florida Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This required the City to prove efficiency with actual data and sometimes retune efficiency models based on external guidance.
For instance, Fort Myers turned over approximately 6,000 documents to the Florida DOGE during this data collection process. Furthermore, new security mandates necessitated adopting protocols like the NIST standard, adding further pressure on resources.
Automation and AI are viewed not as a tool to reduce headcount (as most agencies already lack sufficient staff), but as a method to relieve pressure, provide a higher level of service, and allow team members to focus on complex, engaging work.
The need for automation in government is clear: the average IT team member spends between two and three months per year executing mundane tasks that are ripe for automation, such as password resets, onboarding, and provisioning.
Focusing on automating these types of activities yields significant benefits:
As Velentix’s Graf noted, using automation and AI is akin to “having a team of team members or interns that work 24/7, 365 days a year,” doing the things that customers don’t want to wait for.
To achieve a strong Return on Investment (ROI) from AI, integration and automation are considered the required foundation – especially with conversational AI virtual agents that can pull information from multiple systems. Without this footing, AI is limited to answering questions based only on static content.
“You want these new employees to be happy with their choice to come work for you. There’s nothing more deflating than showing up on day one, and the place isn’t ready for you, so we are focusing on creating a good onboarding experience to really set the stage.”
The City of Fort Myers’ automation journey began with an IT process audit and process mapping exercise to identify where time was spent and where steps could be reduced or automated. They started with “low-hanging fruit,” such as optimizing onboarding and offboarding processes.
Fort Myers focused on defining the specific IT requirements (e.g., software packages, hardware) for every job type.
The automation ensures that the moment a contingent offer is made to a prospective employee, a series of IT tickets is automatically kicked off for necessary provisioning, such as laptop setup, license assignment, and physical configuration.
This ensures the new employee is ready on day one, setting a positive stage for their journey.
This automated process also provides the city with clear data on the cost of hiring an employee and the churn cost from an IT perspective.
“You want these new employees to be happy with their choice to come work for you,” Calkins said. “There’s nothing more deflating than showing up on day one and the place isn’t ready for you, so we are focusing on creating a good onboarding experience to really set the stage.”
Fort Myers is looking beyond IT to utilize Velentix for Enterprise Service Management (ESM). This includes managing non-IT work, such as HR cases or facilities work orders, which often require complex cross-departmental collaboration, with onboarding being a prime example.
For organizations looking to begin or accelerate their modernization roadmap, both Calkins and Graf offered critical advice:
“You can’t do process and automation correctly if the organization isn’t ready for it,” Calkin said. “You have to all want it, and you have to understand it.”
As for advice he would give to other IT leaders in the public sector: “If you’re not there yet, that is your job – to get everyone else on board. You have to do the sales pitch and help people understand you are going to save money, you are going to reduce tickets, and save on resources.”
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