Conwy & Denbighshire NHS Trust, known as C&D, provides health-care services to the two northernmost counties in Wales through a network of hospitals, health centers, and clinics, serving an area of about 2,500 square miles and some 600,000 citizens. Furthermore, C&D is responsible for dental and audiology services for its patients. Our IT staff consists of 20 people and supports PCs for a company of more than 6,000 employees working at approximately 60 sites.

We had outsourced help-desk functions to a software and services company, whose team was located in C&D's main location at Glan Clwyd Hospital, near the town of Rhyl on the North Wales coast. The contract for the help desk service was due for renewal and so with that and the fact we had to face up to 1,000 open tech-support tickets, we determined that we needed to act and bring the help-desk function in-house, and we embarked on a search for a system that would help make IT support more efficient.

We had several requirements for the system: It needed efficient call logging and management, so we could keep track of users' problems, and it needed accessible reporting features in order to manage IT staff resources. We wanted information to be easily found—within three clicks of the mouse—and we wanted it to easily integrate, preferably through standard Web technologies, into our human-resources and asset-management software. Because we're a health organization, we were naturally looking for something reasonably priced.

In seeking a new system, three colleagues and I attended the 2003 Helpdesk and IT Support Show (HITS), held in London. Finally, at the end of a long, tiring day, we ran across a system from LiveTime Software that had the usability and reporting features we were looking for—except one feature, which we noted to company representatives. We eventually invited LiveTime salespeople to make a presentation to our IT group and discovered that LiveTime developers had added the feature we needed; this and the other features of the software helped us to decide to choose LiveTime.

Given the importance of understanding the organizational ramifications of the new software, we spent September and October of 2003 discussing workflow issues related to how we would use the software, and then we conducted an asset audit to collect all the necessary information for implementing the system. Once the software was deployed in December 2003, we'd intended to run the two outsourced system and the LiveTime software in parallel for a month as a precautionary measure. The trial was complicated further by the fact that the IT support team was facing multiple changes of its own—a new shift pattern, a new manager, and even a new location.

But after three or four days, we realized the system was running so efficiently that we shut down the outsourced help-desk operations. Our proof: Open trouble-ticket calls went from more than 1,000 to no more than 100.

Anne Martin is an IT support and development manager for Conwy & Denbighshire NHS Trust, part of the Welsh national health service.