5 Practical Service Metrics Local Government IT Can Track (Without a Reporting Nightmare)

If you work in local government IT, you’ve probably been asked some version of this:

“Can you pull together a dashboard that shows how we’re doing?”

In theory, that’s a reasonable request. In practice, it usually turns into a reporting scramble that eats up time and still doesn’t answer the real question: Are residents getting help faster, and are staff spending less time searching for information?

IT support for local government is rarely just “keeping systems running”, it’s also helping departments deliver faster, clearer service. 

The good news is you don’t need a complicated BI project to get useful insight – you just need a few metrics that connect to real work, and a simple way to collect them consistently.

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Not All Metrics Are Created Equal

Some metrics look impressive in a slide deck, but don’t change anything operationally. Others can seem convoluted on paper, but are actually incredibly useful in practice.

Metrics that tend to create noise

• Total number of emails received (volume without context)
  
• Number of tickets closed (doesn’t reflect the quality of work done)
  
• Average “time online” or activity metrics (can be difficult)
  
• A dashboard with unnecessary widgets no one checks after month one
  

Metrics that are actually worth it

• Metrics that connect to:
  
  • Resident experience (speed, clarity, fewer handoffs)
    
  • Staff workload (repeat questions, rework, time spent searching)
    
  • Service reliability (consistency across staff, fewer escalations)

If you only track five things, we recommend starting with the following...

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1) First Response Time

What it tells you: how quickly someone gets an acknowledgment or first helpful answer.

This metric matters because waiting is often what frustrates people, even more than the final outcome. It’s also one of the few metrics that is simple to explain to leadership.

How to measure:

• Shared mailbox: sample timestamps from received time to first reply
  
• Ticketing or 311: use built-in “time to first response”
  
• Start small: pick a representative week each month, then track it over time
  

Tip: Break this down by channel (email vs phone vs 311) if you can. Otherwise one channel can mask another.

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2) Resolution Time

What it tells you: how long it takes to fully close the loop.

While the initial response is about reassurance, the time it takes to resolve an inquiry is about throughput and process.

How to measure:

• Ticketing/311 tools often times have this built in
  
• For email workflows, a lightweight approach is tagging threads as “resolved” and sampling the timeline from first contact to final answer
  

What’s most useful: not just the average, but the range. If your “average” looks fine but a chunk of requests take weeks, that’s where trust can erode behind the scenes.

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3) Repeat Inquiry Rate

What it tells you: how often staff answer the same question again and again.

This is one of the best “quiet workload” metrics because repeat questions feel normal until you quantify them. Then everyone realizes how much time is spent rewriting the same answers.

How to measure:

• Pick 10–15 common topics (permit status, fee schedules, inspections, zoning basics, records requests)
  
• Track how many times those topics appear in:
  
  • Email subject lines
    
  • Ticket categories
    
  • 311 request types
    
  • Call reasons (if your phone system supports it)
    
• Even a simple monthly count gives you a baseline
  

Why this matters for IT: Repeat questions are often a knowledge retrieval issue, not a staffing issue - which means it’s able to be resolved.

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4) “Time Spent Searching” Signals

You don’t need a stopwatch study to know this is happening, it can also be measured indirectly.

APQC found that knowledge workers estimate they spend 2.8 hours per week just looking for or requesting information they need. That shows up everywhere in local government as “Can you resend that form?” or “Who knows the answer to this?”

What to track instead of raw “search time”:

• Number of internal escalations (“Ask your coworker, they know!”)
  
  
• Number of follow-up messages that are purely:
  
  • “Can you send the link?”
    
  • “What’s the latest version of this document?”
    
  • “Who handles this?”
    
• Frequency of outdated attachments or wrong links being sent

How to measure:

• Sample email threads or tickets and tally common “search behaviors”
  
• Repeat quarterly and see if it improves
  

This metric is powerful because it ties directly to staff time, and it’s usually fixable.

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5) Rework and Handoffs

What it tells you: how often a request gets bounced around before someone can answer it.

Ultimately, handoffs are expensive. Every handoff is another delay and another chance for inconsistent information.

How to measure:

• Ticketing: count reassignment events
  
• Email: track how often a message is forwarded internally before a resident gets a real answer
  
• Call centers: measure transfers (if you have that capability)
  

What’s most useful: identify your top 3 “handoff topics.” Those are usually your biggest opportunities for standardization.

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Turning Metrics Into Staffing and Budget Narratives

To communicate these outstanding patterns of issues you’ve tracked, IT support for local government needs to deliver a clear story to their department that outlines problem and solution.

Instead of saying:
“We need more staff.”

You can say:

• “We’re seeing X repeat inquiries per month on these 3 topics.”
  
• “Each one takes about Y minutes to answer.”
  
• “That equals roughly Z staff hours per month spent rewriting the same answers.”
  
  

Ultimately, this narrative is difficult to ignore because it connects service quality to workload in a way that is tangible. 

It also supports smarter investments and workflow operations:

• Standardize the highest repeat topics first
  
• Reduce handoffs by clarifying ownership
  
• Make “latest version” information easier to retrieve
  
• Continue to measure results after rollout
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How Acta Can Help IT Track and Improve These Metrics

If you’re trying to improve metrics like repeat inquiries, handoffs, and time spent searching, it often comes down to two things:

1. Making accurate information easier to access in the flow of work
   
2. Keeping answers consistent across staff and channels
   

That’s the problem Acta Solutions is built to solve:

Acta helps local governments reduce repeat questions and make service more consistent without changing core workflows.

• Pre-approved replies and attachments in Outlook so staff can answer routine questions quickly
  
• A browser-based knowledge hub so teams can find the current SOP, link, or form directly in permitting platforms without digging for the right information
  
• An Analytics Dashboard that highlights what questions are being asked the most so you can target departmental improvements
  

If you want to see what that looks like in practice, you can explore Acta’s products, such as our Smart Response System, or schedule a quick 15-min demo here.