Atlassian is looking to help infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams improve their IT service management (ITSM) efforts with a set of new capabilities for Jira Service Management.
At its Atlassian High-Velocity ITSM event, the company detailed how it is working to enable I&O teams to work more efficiently and achieve better business outcomes. Among the new features coming to Atlassian's Jira Service Management ITSM platform are integrated chat and virtual agents to improve user experience. Prebuilt templates for marketing, finances, and analytics to help automate service desk operations are also coming to the platform, along with more automation for change requests.
In addition, Atlassian is now adding incident response on the go for mobile alerts on service issues as well as enhanced capabilities for service management at scale.
"Two years ago, we announced that we were going to be doubling down on the IT service management space built on the foundations of JIRA software," Shihab Hamid, head of product at Atlassian, told ITPro Today. "The idea is that we're using the workflow engine for both technical and nontechnical teams for service management, so it extends to HR, marketing, finance, and facilities to centralize and streamline service requests."
Jira Service Management Brings Virtual Agents and Chat to ITSM
Getting access to ITSM capabilities used to require users to log into a specific platform.
Atlassian is adding new capabilities to Jira Service Management to better support users.
Atlassian is changing that paradigm by enabling chat-based integration to Jira Service Management. With the chat integration, users in Slack as well as Microsoft Teams can now get access to the Jira Service Management system. The technology behind the chat integration comes from tech startup Halp, which was acquired by Atlassian.
"Whether it's Slack, email, or a Jira ticket, employees can choose the option that's closest to them, and service management will function in the background," Hamid said. "The idea is that help seekers can request help from chat and get connected to an agent, and the agent can have all the ITSM superpowers at their fingertips."
Going a step further, Atlassian is also now previewing virtual agent capabilities that use artificial intelligence (AI). The AI-powered virtual agent technology came to Atlassian via the acquisition of startup Percept.ai. Hamid said the virtual agent capabilities in Jira Service Management will use machine learning to learn the patterns from previous requests to understand what the user is asking for.
Jira Service Management Boosts ITSM Automation
Another area of improvement in Jira Service Management is the ability to handle incident response on mobile devices. Hamid said that IT staff can now get alerts and service schedules, as well the ability to help triage incidents when they occur.
Atlassian is enhancing its mobile capabilities to better support ITSM incidents whenever they occur.
Additionally, the system is being updated to have more automated capabilities around change requests. So instead of every change request requiring some form of human interaction, an enhanced approval system can help automate the approval of some common requests.
The overall goal of ITSM that Atlassian is working toward is giving users a unified service experience while supporting all the different tools and approaches that an organization might have to connect.
"We want to build a system that can provide a unified help experience to employees, regardless of the tool that's getting used to serve those requests," Hamid said.
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Sean Michael Kerner is an IT consultant, technology enthusiast and tinkerer. He consults to industry and media organizations on technology issues.