Government of British Columbia, Public Service: Ministry of Citizen Services
Introduction
As part of the Government of British Columbia’s Public Service, the Ministry of Citizens’ Services provides a wide range of services to British Columbians across the province, both in person and online. From B.C. Services Cards to freedom of information to information technology infrastructure, they help deliver services that the people of British Columbia, Canada, can count on.
Digital transformation has modernized governmental online presence and service delivery
Approximately five years ago, several leaders within the Ministry of Citizens’ Services created the mission of initiating significant change through digital transformation. Early research and interviews across various ministries revealed two critical value propositions executive leaders needed to solve:
- Delivery velocity: “How can we get our services to market faster?”
- Service reliability: “How can we ensure application excellence and user trust?”
Finding a reliable uptime monitoring system with less false positives and holistic reporting of external monitoring health
As the B.C. government’s software developer ecosystem grew – so did their need for reliable reporting on the health of the DevOps hosting infrastructure for the many applications and services running within.
Unfortunately, their previous public facing monitoring tool was unable to help tell an accurate story of performance due to frequent false positives, poor quality of service, and ineffectual support. These incorrect downtime alarms not only made quantitative reporting difficult, they impacted Citizen Services’ ability to cultivate user’s trust and qualitative confidence in overall experience quality.
Their search for a new uptime monitoring partner brought them to Uptime.com. They were quickly impressed by our availability and feature depth – both in terms of technical systems and human support. As part of their evaluative process, B.C. Citizen Services purposefully tested:
- Outages: By comparing data accuracy between monitoring systems.
- Support: By gauging the responsiveness and technical acumen of Support.
Building strong working relationships with technical support
B.C. Citizen Services was thrilled by the level of support they received – and continue to receive – from Uptime.com. It was clear from the get-go that reliable human support was a top priority, which they noted as a major difference between Uptime.com and the alternative providers they evaluated.
Not only does B.C. Citizen Services benefit from 24/7 responsiveness and deep technical expertise, they also cited the consistency of Uptime.com’s Support as a significant benefit. Where their other vendors seemingly switch out Support reps every quarter, B.C. Citizen Services has worked with the same Support expert and dedicated Customer Success Advisor from day one. This has resulted in stronger account relationships, quicker feature request development, and faster resolutions due to the technical familiarity and rapport on both sides.
“You actually want to talk to your users. This seems obvious, but many of your competitors do not. Our Support partner truly knows what they’re doing, understands Uptime.com’s product, can answer any question, and advocates for us by submitting improvements and innovation requests to system backlogs and product roadmaps.”
– Olena Mitovska, Director of Private and Public Cloud Services at BC Government