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Case Studies - The Department of Social Development (SD)
» http://www.sdc.gc.ca
The Department of Social Development (SD) is mandated with helping to secure and strengthen Canada’s social foundation. They do this by helping families with children, supporting people with disabilities and ensuring that seniors can fully participate in their communities.
They provide the policies, services and programs for Canadians who need assistance in overcoming challenges they encounter in their lives and their communities. This includes income security programs, such as the Canada Pension Plan. They are a client-centered organization, committed to continually improving service delivery for Canadians. THE CHALLENGE
The IT division of SDC is composed of various teams handling the day-to-day activities of the department. Among them is the ‘Support Systems for Third Parties’ group, which provides support to various external clients for internal IT applications of the department across Canada. The support team use word documents and excel
worksheets to keep track of support calls handled.
Often support calls refer to the same problem, which was resolved earlier. There was no system or process in place to track issues reported earlier and their resolutions. This was a handicap, as the support staff had to often search for the solution, causing the wheel to be reinvented every time the problem was reported. The team required a knowledge base, where they could record problems reported, along with their solutions. The users should be able to query for problems based on a search criteria provided similar to those by many search engines. THE SOLUTION
An n-tier web based, database driven solution was designed, developed and implemented. The system will enable users to add issues to the knowledge base and query on them. The system supports two specific roles, one the Administrator, the other be the normal user.
Administrators can create users, and subjects to help categorize problem reported to assist in querying. Users can create problems, add notes to existing problems, add links to external sites and also ask for a notification email when the problem posted
is resolved. THE VALUE
The support could now resolve issues quickly, by looking up a centralized database for similar problems and their solutions. This significantly reduced the turnaround time to resolve problems and helped improve quality of support. |
