Six portals and a phone number
Ask a new employee how to get a standing desk and watch them guess. Facilities? IT, because it has a monitor arm? Procurement? Each team has its own portal, its own login and its own idea of what belongs there. When the guess is wrong, the request bounces, and the employee calls someone.
HR and IT service desks see this every day. A real share of their contacts aren’t problems at all. They are “where do I go for this?” and “I asked two weeks ago, what happened?” Both questions exist only because the work is split across systems the employee can’t see into.
Organized around the employee
The Kinetic portal is arranged by what people are trying to do, not by which department owns the system: I’m new, I’m moving desks, something’s broken, I need access. Search accepts plain language, so “my badge stopped working” lands on the right form.
Forms know who’s asking. Manager, cost center, location and current entitlements come from Workday and Entra ID, so the employee only answers questions that matter. A teacher at one school sees different services than an administrator at the district office.
Then the request goes where the work actually happens. A desk move might create a facilities job, update badge access for the new floor, and open an IT task to move the phone, each with its own approval if needed. The employee sees one request with one status. Every open request, across every team, is on one page.
What changes for HR and IT
The teams keep their tools. HR case workers still work in their HR system; the IT desk still works in ServiceNow or BMC. What they lose is the status-chasing. When people can see where their request stands, they stop calling to ask.
Fairfax County Public Schools replaced a mix of phone calls, paper forms and email across more than 200 schools and facilities with one portal in front of its existing BMC Remedy system. Staff at every school now use the same interface, and the district cut fulfillment time in half. Read the FCPS case study.
Where to start
Start with one department’s ten most common requests and the systems behind them, then add the next department’s. The portal grows by adding services, not by rebuilding. HR request management and facilities management are the usual second and third.