Pasco County boosts trust with constituents and enhances agency reputation with Dynatrace

Driven to be the premier county in Florida by building trust with citizens

With the goal of becoming the premier county in Florida, Pasco County has made it a strategic objective to deliver services that exceed customer expectations in a manner that builds trust, inspires confidence, and promotes accountability. With a growing population of digitally savvy citizens, it was critical to ensure that the county’s digital services are world-class, reliable, and resilient. As it continued to digitize its services to achieve this aim, the county also faced an increased risk from cybersecurity threats as digital transformation inevitably expanded the attack surface. As a result, Pasco County needed to adopt measures to ensure the integrity of its systems and protect sensitive citizen data that could be used for fraudulent activity.

To achieve these aims, Pasco County needed to modernize its internal operations and security processes. Teams previously worked in silos with their own toolsets, leading to blind spots and lack of effective collaboration, both internally and with the agency’s service providers. They also relied on complex manual processes, which increased the risk of problems that could impact citizen experiences and allow vulnerabilities to leave systems exposed. As a result, they were constantly in fire-drill mode, as they worked to hold service providers accountable for SLAs and to deliver seamless experiences for citizens. This made it more difficult to ensure services were available 24/7, hindering Pasco County’s mission and impacting its ability to build trust and enhance the agency’s reputation amongst constituents.

Adopting a proactive and intelligent approach

Pasco County set up an integrated network operations and security center (INSOC) that would enable its teams to collaborate more effectively both internally and externally. This would help them shift from being reactive to proactive in addressing problems and ensure uninterrupted service delivery for constituents. To enable this, the County needed a platform that would serve as a digital backbone, providing end-to-end visibility and a consolidated view across its environment, and automate its manual operations and security processes. The team also sought a solution that could provide real-time insights into how users interacted with the County’s systems and applications, so they could understand how they could improve the experience for both citizens and employees. They also wanted to hold their vendors accountable for delivering secure code. After a thorough evaluation of the market, the team identified Dynatrace as the best solution for its requirements.

“Lack of visibility was preventing us from identifying issues and the root cause quickly and efficiently, leading to problems coming back to bite us again and again,” says Bert Bertagna, Assistant Chief Information Officer, Pasco County. “Before Dynatrace, we could easily go upwards of 12 hours before we realized there was a user impacting issue. Now, teams get alerted and can immediately take pre-emptive action which avoids a complete system outage or failure.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Enhanced customer satisfaction: With Dynatrace, Pasco County sees exactly how constituents and internal users navigate its services. This provides teams with the insights that enable them to prioritize new projects and programs that help to create world-class experiences for constituents and deliver additional value to the organization. As a result, Pasco County has been able to bolster customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores in various categories by up to six percentage points.
• Better citizen experiences: As the backbone of Pasco County’s INSOC, Dynatrace’s AIOps capabilities provide deep insight into the root cause of any problems instantly. This helps teams hold vendors accountable for ensuring 99.999% service availability. Dynatrace’s application security capabilities also give Pasco County real time, continuous, automatic vulnerability analysis and protection across all layers of the stack, including integrated vendor systems. This empowers teams to identify security issues before they go to production and prioritize efforts to remediate vulnerabilities based on the risk to citizens’ data. Within 12 months of deploying Dynatrace, the team reduced the number of critical, user-impacting incidents by more than 50%.
• Improved staff morale: Dynatrace’s AIOps capabilities eliminate fire drills and reduce wasted manual effort for Pasco County’s teams, enabling them to enjoy a better work/life balance and spend more time with their families, improving morale and retention. As a result, they are free to focus more of their efforts on strategic work that advances the department’s mission to improve government services and build trust with constituents.
• Pre-emptive response: Dynatrace is enabling Pasco County to drive more efficient operations and pre-emptive incident response as the digital backbone by consolidating monitoring capabilities and breaking down silos between teams both internally and externally. By bringing teams together and uniting them around a single source of truth, Pasco County has reduced the costs and wasted effort of service management and enhanced collaboration, helping them to reduce mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) by more than 50% in the first 12 months.

“Dynatrace has become the anchor for our INSOC and has improved our focus on service availability and quality,” Bert says. “The platform gives us complete visibility, enabling us to move from being reactive to proactive, and in many cases predictive in our efforts to enhance service availability and quality. That means our teams aren’t constantly in fire drill mode, and they’re more empowered to focus on innovation and delivering experiences that boost our constituents’ trust in government services. Dynatrace is central to our mission to make Pasco County the premier government services provider in the state.”