How 25 IT professionals made every procedure current for 1,800 agents

Twenty-five people, 3,500 devices, and no reliable place to look

The Département de l'Orne is a departmental council in Normandy serving 280,000 inhabitants. Behind its public services (roads, social services, public facilities) sit 1,800 agents, and behind them a team of 25 IT professionals responsible for roughly 100 business applications and 3,500 devices across the territory.

The knowledge those 25 people needed was everywhere except in one place.

• Buried, or effectively lost. Procedures lived in Word documents on shared drives, in Alfresco, in OneNote notebooks, each team keeping its own version. Even the person who wrote one could not always find it again.
• Documenting was overhead, not workflow. Every incident meant writing it up across different systems. A new procedure took days to draft, format and distribute. When a colleague went on leave, their solutions went with them.
• Stale procedures carried real risk. With no review process, old procedures stayed active. A technician could apply a superseded fix or miss a security update. For a team running infrastructure that serves a whole department, out-of-date documentation is not just inefficient. It is dangerous.

We had documentation everywhere: Word files on shared drives, procedures in Alfresco, incident resolutions scattered across OneNote.

The answer arrives inside the ticket

The Département de l'Orne deployed Elium against GLPI, its IT service management tool. The principle was simple: knowledge reaches technicians where they already work, not in a second system they have to remember to open.

• One place, categorised properly. All technical documentation sits on a single platform, organised by service domain and tagged by software, hardware and procedure type. One place to look instead of twelve.
• An AI assistant inside the GLPI ticket. A browser plugin puts contextual answers next to the incident details. Technicians query the knowledge base without leaving the ticket, so there is no system-switching and no break in the work.
• Procedures that cannot quietly expire. Automated obsolescence management triggers annual reviews. Every procedure has an expiry date, and nothing stays active without being verified. That is what makes the 100% figure meaningful rather than aspirational.
• One standard across three domains. Project management, systems administration and helpdesk now document to the same standard, so knowledge crosses between disciplines by default instead of by luck.

All our technical documentation is now centralised. Elium's AI assistant answers questions instantly: it's the best ally our support technicians have.

Structural, not cosmetic

Twenty-five IT professionals now run a governed knowledge base covering the full scope of departmental IT: 100 applications, 3,500 devices, three service domains, every procedure verified and current.

Resolution times improved because technicians land on the right answer on the first search rather than the third. Knowledge no longer leaves the building when someone takes a fortnight off. And because the review cycles run themselves, the team spends its time on the work only it can do instead of chasing documents that may or may not still be true.

The platform is intuitive and everyone picked it up quickly. Having AI assistance directly in our ticketing system improves how we handle incidents. We're building lasting knowledge instead of losing it.

A team of 25 cannot afford to document twice or to search three times. The Département de l'Orne made the knowledge come to the technician instead, inside the ticket already open in front of them.