In an email to all States employees, Gé Drossaert, Chief Digital & Information Officer, has said the move away from Agilisys to a multi-vendor model of IT and related service providers is going well.

“I’m very pleased to report that the transition has been relatively seamless, and we are now returning to business as usual (BAU). Thank you for your patience and support during this transition period, particularly around the introduction of the new Service Desk. 

Service Desk update

When our new Service Desk launched on 1 August, the team took on 1,123 tickets that had yet to be resolved. Working through these was an initial priority.

If you’ve logged a call through the new IT Service Desk portal, you may have noticed that tickets are now classified as either an incident — where something isn’t working as expected—or requests, which cover routine tasks such as onboarding new starters or uploading data to SAP.

During its first two weeks, the Service Desk logged 1,007 new incidents. Of these, 64% have already been resolved, with 70% of those completed within 24 hours.

While we’re pleased with how quickly our new Service Desk has got up to speed, I would ask that you continue to log general IT requests via the IT Service Desk icon on your desktop in the first instance. Please call the Service Desk if you are experiencing an IT issue that is impacting your work or you need to escalate a ticket.

This will support our Service Desk colleagues in their efforts to help staff. 

Windows 11

We will be rolling out Windows 11 in the coming months, which will be an essential upgrade. We will revert in due course with more information.

Some colleagues will have laptops that are not compatible with Windows 11 and these will be replaced. We have put a programme in place to do this.  

Projects

Many projects require IT support and those that were identified as critical continued during the transition period with minimal disruption. However, we naturally had to pause non-critical projects as we moved to our new model for IT delivery. I’m pleased that as part of our move to BAU we are now looking to restart paused projects in a phased way. 

Teamwork

Lastly, I would just like to provide a brief update on our newly extended Digital & Technology team. We have welcomed many of the Guernsey-based staff from the previous IT partner to our team and I would like to thank them for their trust, patience and hard work going the extra mile during the transition, making the initial operational experience as seamless as possible to you, with improvements set to continue in the months ahead. 

As I’m sure you can all appreciate, transitioning the many IT systems the States of Guernsey relies on for the delivery of public services is not an easy task and we have certainly encountered some challenges. All of these issues were swiftly resolved and business continued with minimal interruptions. For me, this highlights the huge amount of work that has taken place in recent months to ensure we were as prepared as possible to transition from the previous IT partner to our new multi-vendor model. 

Thank you to everyone involved and to all colleagues for your continued support.

Gé Drossaert, Chief Digital & Information Officer”.