Launched only six years ago, Jira Service Desk is Atlassian’s fastest-growing product. We recognized that IT was becoming increasingly saddled by outdated tools and processes for the DevOps and cloud era, and we built Jira Service Desk to help those teams provide better service with IT service management (ITSM) software that’s flexible and collaborative.
We soon realized that, with the rise of digital work, business teams were having the same service management challenges as their IT peers. They were trying to navigate tracking work at increasing volume, creating stakeholder transparency, and delivering a range of common services with consistency. Our customers discovered that Jira Service Desk could extend to business teams before we did, including teams like Twitter – which creates service desks for their HR, facilities, and procurement departments – and Airbnb.
To support this growing discipline of enterprise service management (ESM), we’re introducing new templates and workflows in Jira Service Desk that are purpose-built for business teams in HR, legal, and facilities. HR and facilities teams can now leverage Jira Service Desk to more easily manage tasks like employee onboarding and fielding maintenance requests, and legal teams can shift from manually chasing down signatures to working collaboratively with an automated digital workflow.
Highest score in strategy for enterprise service management
Forrester’s Now Tech: Enterprise Service Management, Q3 2019 report indicates that enterprises invest in ESM to “improve visibility and access to enterprise services of all forms. To help workers navigate the complex ecosystem of internal services, ESM tools provide enterprise service portals and intelligent navigational services. At a macro level, organizations also gain better insight into the supply and demand for services across departments and overall service work in progress.”
The team at Forrester recognized in their Wave report that Jira Service Desk’s market presence has grown rapidly. And our customers report that the codeless setup, easy-to-configure forms, workflows, and reporting were major factors in the decision to adopt the tool. And as DevOps takes hold across organizations, Forrester noted that we connect ESM and DevOps. Jira Service Desk intersects well with planning, collaboration, task management, and product development (Jira Software and Trello); continuous delivery (Bitbucket); knowledge management (Confluence); and operations (Opsgenie and Statuspage).
Companies that have seen the flexibility of Jira Service Desk are consistently seeing the tool spread across internal teams. Lucid Motors, a luxury electric vehicle brand, set up 15 Jira Service Desk projects for teams like manufacturing and the battery teams. And AppDynamics, a provider of application performance monitoring software, supported their rapid company growth by onboarding over 700 new employees in one year with Jira Service Desk.
Business teams can configure and manage their own service desks
Jira Service Desk’s new business templates make it even easier for teams to get up and running with a service desk. Within minutes, customers can create an HR onboarding template and associated workflow. The new out-of-the-box capability for HR, facilities, and legal teams reduces dependency on IT, giving business teams much-desired autonomy.
After interviewing customers about their use cases, we created templates to cover the tasks that teams like HR, legal, and facilities work on. The out-of-the-box functionality gives teams a leg up, and Jira Service Desk’s flexibility makes it easy to configure later.
HR managers or operations managers can also directly create, update, and maintain their own service desk with minimal IT involvement.
By funneling work through a service desk, HR teams have gone from physically carrying files between buildings to acquire signatures to providing a full slew of services like provisioning a laptop, onboarding new employees, and enrolling them in benefits that can be readily accessed online through a self-service portal. Employees who want answers fast can look to the company-wide FAQ or request a common service through the portal with a catalog-like experience.
Besides these new templates and workflows, it’s also worth noting our recent acquisition of Code Barrel, the makers of Automation for Jira, which will offer additional value for teams in IT and across businesses. HR teams, for example, can increase efficiency and reduce toil by automating tedious tasks like updating employee data between systems like Jira Service Desk and BambooHR.
ITSM software for the future of IT
The investments in ESM are in addition to the continued investments we’re making across core ITSM processes. We’ll continue to add functionality to the new Jira Service Desk experience (also called “next-gen”), which was launched earlier this year. Next-gen is designed to make service desk setup and administration even easier for all teams. For our segment of customers with access to the next-gen view of Jira Service Desk, asset management functionality is now available, and customers with next-gen can leverage one of myriad CMDB and asset management options available in the Atlassian marketplace such as Reftab, Device42, and Insight by Riada.
We also recently shipped improvements to the ways managers can approve requests on the go by making it accessible on mobile devices, further streamlining common request management and change management tasks.
As the ESM trend continues to build upon ITSM foundations, our customers can leverage the expanding innovations in Jira Service Desk. Be sure to stay up to date with all the latest product updates and what lies ahead.