Lessons from adoption of open source trouble ticket system in Turin Municipality to manage citizens´ requests

This paper focuses on the presentation of the Turin Municipality experience in the adoption of a trouble ticket system to manage citizens´ requests. In the last years the number of requests the citizens have sent by email to different municipal offices has constantly increased, besides the information are spread among many offices so email often must be forwarded to other offices. This scenario causes the impossibility to track the requests and to know in any moment the amount of open requests and their status. The City of Turin decided to adopt a trouble ticket system in order to improve offices efficiency to provide the requested information on time still allowing citizen to send email. We will describe the process required to choose the suitable software, the reasons for choosing an open source system, the side effects on organisation related with the new way of work and the software and hardware architecture hosting the system. The lesson learnt could be used by other public entities, with a complexity level as Turin, to better decide if such a kind of tool can be adopted comparing costs, benefits on municipal offices and, last but not least, citizens satisfaction.