Atlassian’s IT asset and service configuration management handbook

Atlassian’s approach to IT asset and service configuration management

The Assets feature in Jira Service Management is a centralized repository of your assets and configuration management. Using Assets, teams can track their company resources and gain visibility into the relationships between critical applications, services, and the underlying infrastructure. Our approach is team-centric, and emphasizes autonomy with alignment - we want teams to have the flexibility to run fast and operate with autonomy, while ensuring IT feels confident that work is aligned and doesn’t introduce risk to the business. This is much easier when delivery and operations teams are united on one platform, where all assets and related issues are stored in one place. You’ll know the reason for acquiring hardware, for example, who it’s assigned to, and its past history. Whether it’s a support ticket, new hire requisition, or purchase order, Jira Service Management enables smooth communication, visibility, and reduced friction between development and IT teams.This handbook details Atlassian’s approach, with step-by-step instructions to help you get started, and a comprehensive guide to using Jira Service Management for this purpose. Whether you’re looking to improve your IT asset and service configuration management practices, or you’re just learning what they can do for your team, we put together this guide to help you on your journey.

Why IT leadership values IT asset and service configuration management

When an incident occurs the first question asked is “what is impacted?” In the end, when the crisis has been resolved, we reflect to realize that the price tag - the cost of business disruption, overtime, extra work, vendor fees, etc. - is enormous. Teams waste time fighting chaos instead of innovating.Adoption of IT asset and service configuration management practices provides necessary visibility into an organization’s technology landscape. Enterprises rely on increasingly complex technology environments, with assets ranging from software to purchase orders to laptops or servers. IT asset management can be thought of as the “universe” of technologies, and service configuration management provides in-depth transparency into each asset therein. The two can help your team avoid outages and restore service more quickly, improve the customer experience, and reduce costs of unused equipment or unnecessary licenses.