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Jira Service Management

A Modern ITSM Solution for an Evolving IT Landscape
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Introduction

More organizations than ever are embracing digital transformation. According to the KPMG 2020 U.S. CEO Outlook, 76% of survey respondents indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digitization of operations and creation of next-generation operating models by a matter of months to years. IT, long at the center of digital transformation, and already facing ever-increasing complexity and business demands, is now under undue pressure to meet the moment.

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With Jira Service Management, Atlassian brings together a wide range of features and functionality to better support the challenges that modern ITSM, Development and Operations teams face.
 
Jira Service Management (JSM) is designed to help IT teams deliver customer value faster without adding significant cost of complexity, make work more visible and transparent across teams to support cross-functional decision making and issue resolution, and streamline and speed the flow of information between teams, with a particular focus on ITSM and DevOps teams.
 
In this paper, we will explore how digital transformation is changing the role of ITSM in supporting the business, and creating a demand for new, more modern ITSM technology and infrastructure. Then we will take a look at how Atlassian’s Jira Service Management can be used to modernize ITSM operations.

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Digital Transformation & the Impact on ITSM

As more organizations embrace digital transformation, many ITSM teams are seeing a significant increase in the need for their services, particularly in three key areas. First, the pursuit of business agility—the ability for a business to thrive in the face of uncertainty and disruption—is creating an increased demand for IT teams to implement and manage modern software systems across the organization. Second, the adoption of more modern operational and development practices like Agile and DevOps is creating demand for new, more integrated technology platforms that break down silos between ITSM, development, and operations teams. Third, rising consumer expectations around more personalized, informed, and responsive service is behind the need for modern systems that support these interactions, while minimizing the lift on ITSM teams.

As a result, ITSM teams are seeking to modernize their own service desk technology platforms to help them meet the demand.

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The Need for Business Agility Is Creating Increased Demand on ITSM Teams

One of the most significant reasons organizations are embracing digital transformation is the need for greater business agility—the ability to respond in a resilient manner to rapidly changing market conditions, business needs, and consumer expectations. While this was true prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, this universal disruption has accelerated the trend. In fact, in their 2021 Business Agility Report, the Business Agility Institute found that more than 87% of organizations reported increases in business agility throughout the COVID disruption. As organizations make strategic investments to achieve greater business agility, a large part of their focus is on technology, a key, foundational function in supporting overall digital transformation.

As part of this transition, IT teams are recognizing the need for more dynamic infrastructure to support dynamic business needs, strategically focus human capital, and better manage costs. Increasingly, they are moving the operation of applications from within their own walls to the cloud. In fact, Gartner predicts 80% of all enterprise workloads will shift to the Cloud by 2025.

Investments in cloud infrastructure are only part of the equation. Given the need to rapidly respond to business changes, deliver products and services faster and with fewer issues, collaborate cross-functionally, respond more efficiently and effectively to outages, and support more engaging customer experiences, IT and support teams are seeking more modern technology solutions that increase transparency, make it easier to share information, and remove friction from internal processes and external interactions.

 

Agile and DevOps Adoption Are Increasing Demand on ITSM Teams

The Agile Manifesto was released in 2001, and over the course of the more than 20 years since then, it has become a widely accepted standard practice. Agile continues to see rapid adoption and expansion. According to the 15th Annual State of Agile Report, agile adoption by development teams increased from 37% in 2020 to 86% in 2021. Further, the trend toward enterprise-wide agile adoption— meaning the expansion of agile practices beyond development teams and into the business at large—is also gaining traction. The same report indicates that more than half—52 percent—of responding companies’ teams, including those outside of development, had adopted agile.

The term DevOps, a culturally driven set of practices designed to support close collaboration between development and operations teams in order to deliver better-quality software at a faster pace, was coined in 2009. Like agile, in the intervening years, it has seen widespread growth and adoption. In fact, the Puppet 2021 State of DevOps Report finds that “83 percent of IT decision makers report their organizations are implementing DevOps practices to unlock higher business value through better quality software, faster delivery times, more secure systems and the codification of principles.”

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While agile and DevOps are two distinct practices, they are highly compatible. Many companies adopt both, and the impact they have on ITSM teams is similar. Both rely heavily on dynamic, often real-time, feedback loops that incorporate input regarding issues with software and business systems. The service desk is often the first place issues come to light and the source of rich information that needs to be fed into that loop. However, older, siloed technology that lacks integration and visibility between DevOps and ITSM tools and processes inhibits collaboration between the two functions and makes it difficult for DevOps teams to access ITSM data. A modern, integrated technology platform across development, operations, ITSM, and often the business at large are critical to the widespread, rapid adoption of both agile and DevOps.

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Skyrocketing Customer Expectations Are Increasing Demand on IT Teams

The easy, personalized experiences consumers have in their personal lives are setting new expectations for how people interact with technology in the workplace. Both external and internal customers expect on-demand access to information and data, regular, personalized status updates, and fast, efficient problem resolution. Further, as the world has rapidly shifted to remote work, companies have been forced to find new ways for teams to share information, and for individuals to collaborate, that do not rely on in-person interactions. Consequently, IT teams are forced to rethink how they deliver, operate, and support services for both internal and external customers, and this often means modernizing their own ITSM software. 

The ability to search for any information quickly at any time and on any device means that today’s enterprise customers have higher expectations around self-service for their business-related questions and concerns. They want to be able to do a quick search of a wiki or knowledge base to find the information they need, instead of submitting a ticket and waiting for a response. Service desk staff benefit from this approach as well—it limits the number of tickets submitted, so the service desk team can focus on more complex issues where a more advanced skillset is required. 

Further, customers today are seeking increased visibility and greater personalization throughout each interaction. Whether they call in or log on to submit a ticket, they want to see and track the progress of that ticket in real time, in much the same way that they can track an Uber, Lyft, or delivery. They also want to be able to put a face and a name to their issues—to know who is responsible for resolving them—and they expect regular updates from that person. For the IT service desk, this increased visibility and personalization drive accountability, which ultimately drives better response times and improved customer satisfaction.

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Jira Service Management: A Modern ITSM Tool to Power High-Velocity Teams

In developing Jira Service Management, Atlassian focused on supporting three core areas of functionality: helping teams deliver customer value fast without adding significant cost of complexity, making work more visible and transparent across teams to support cross-functional decision making and issue resolution, and streamlining and speeding the flow of information between teams, with a particular focus on ITSM and DevOps teams.

For an increasing number of companies, Jira Service Management is helping them meet the demands inherent in digital transformation, while reducing the burden on IT teams.

  • A single, integrated, extensible platform – JSM is part of the Atlassian ecosystem, and many companies may already be using other Atlassian tools like Jira Software and Confluence. By implementing JSM as their ITSM solution, they may benefit from fewer tools and integrations to manage, better visibility and reporting across the company, increased ability to automate, and streamlined user management. Another key thing to note is that JSM is not just for ITSM teams—it is flexible enough to support business teams of all types.

  • A way to bridge the gap between development, operations, and ITSM – JSM is built on Jira, a tool that many development and operations teams are already using. When the ITSM team is working within the same platform as DevOps teams, they have the benefit of a fully connected environment. They have greater contextual awareness around issues, and it is more straightforward for those teams to work closely together to resolve them.

  • A customer-centric solution – With JSM, companies can set up a single self-service portal where customers can go to submit tickets of all types. It is designed to provide visibility to all stakeholders, including people working the ticket as well as customers, and provides functionality that supports automatic updates. Confluence, Atlassian’s knowledge base solution, can be tightly integrated with JSM so that customers can get answers to questions and resolve common problems quickly, without having to submit a ticket.

How Jira Service Management Streamlines ITSM Operations

Jira Service Management helps teams across the enterprise work together in these key areas: request, incident, problem, change, asset, configuration, and knowledge management.

  • Request Management
    With Jira Service Management, it’s straightforward to set up a centralized portal where your internal and/or external customers can request services of all types. JSM also lets you take in requests from email and chat, and they can be grouped, categorized, prioritized, and triaged by type. Once a ticket is opened, every stakeholder on the team—the service desk agent, the people working the ticket, and the customer—can stay informed about it through automatic alerts and updates.
     
    • Set up a centralized portal for all service requests
    • Take in requests from email and chat
    • Use pre-built forms or create your own with low/no code
    • Group similar requests and prioritize them
    • Set service level agreements and track deadlines
    • Deflect requests with an out-of-box knowledge base
    • Measure and improve with reports and dashboards
    • Send customer satisfaction surveys

  • Incident and Problem Management
    Because Jira Service Management is built on Jira where DevOps teams are already working, it bridges the gap between development, operations, and IT teams, so everyone can work together to address incidents in real time. With JSM, you can link support tickets to incidents, escalate incidents to the right people so they can start working on them, and track and analyze incidents to prevent them from happening again.

    • Customize on-call schedules, routing rules, and escalation policies
    • Link support tickets to incidents
    • Share status information and updates across multiple channels
    • Set up chat and video conference channels
    • Escalate major incidents
    • Track actions taken in an incident timeline
    • Create post-mortem reports

  • Change Management Features
    Jira Service Management is tightly integrated with Atlassian Bitbucket Pipelines, and can also be integrated with third-party CI/CD tools. This means IT operations teams can get information and context around changes to better understand and minimize risk. Functionality includes viewing change requests, scoring risks, configuring and automating approval workflows, tracking deployments, and creating change plans.

    • View change requests made in CI/CD tools
    • Score the risk and determine whether to automate deployment
    • Configure approval workflows based on risk
    • Automate approval and deployment of low-risk changes
    • Track deployments
    • Create change plans
    • Manage the out-of-the-box change calendar

  • Asset and Configuration Management
    Jira Service Management offers built-in asset and configuration management at the Cloud Premium and Enterprise license levels. It is designed to be open and flexible so that any team can manage any type of asset. It supports tracking assets, managing the asset lifecycle, and planning for new purchases. In addition, assets can be linked directly to service requests and issues. You can also see dependencies between assets and configuration items and services, and scan your network for configuration changes.
     
    • Track assets for inventory management, auditing, and compliance
    • Manage costs and your asset lifecycle
    • Scan your network to discover new assets and configuration items
    • View dependencies between assets and configuration items and services
    • Automate issue creation based on unauthorized changes
    • Add new assets based on information in Jira tickets

  • Knowledge Management
    Thanks to tight integration between Jira Service Management and Confluence, ITSM teams can take advantage of knowledge base functionality for their own documentation purposes and to support customers. Both agents and customers can read articles to learn how to address common issues.
     
    • Create knowledge base articles
    • Deflect tickets and enable self-service
    • Manage, edit, and format content from within JSM
    • Use machine learning to support search
    • Track which articles are being used to identify common problems

For more information about ITSM trends and best practices, collaboration between IT and DevOps teams, and Atlassian’s Jira Service Management, contact Isos Technology. We’re ready to help you achieve your service management and business goals!

Looking for additional Jira Service Management information and resources? Read all about JSM!

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