The Atlassian logo on their headquarters building.
Image: Sundry Photography/Adobe Stock

On Thursday, Atlassian presented more than a dozen new features for their IT service management solution Jira Service Management, all aimed at making the employee service experience more streamlined.

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New features in Jira Service Management

Everyone can chat

Now even free Jira Service Management members can have access to chat and virtual agents in an effort to speed up response time.

“Chat and conversational ticketing is now going to be available in your service management, connecting to both Slack and Microsoft Teams, and chat will be available across all plans,” said Shihab Hamid, head of product for Jira Service Management, at the German press conference.

Marketing, finance and analytics get their own template

These departments will have pre-built templates that apply across HR, facilities, legal and customer service. On top of this, Jira Service Management is “continuing to add more templates that make it easy for any of these teams to spin up their own service desk and offer help,” Hamid said.

Mobile alerts for teams are available

Alerts on mobile are now available for teams. They can edit on-call schedules, “escalate major incidents, swarm and update teams on timeline and notify stakeholders — all via mobile device,” according to Atlassian.

Automating requests and approvals

Atlassian boasts that “teams can get even more granular about the approval process, such as excluding certain people from approving, or setting up special rules for multi-group approvals.”

Hamid calls it “an early access program for our virtual agent technology into your service management. You can imagine as you open up and chat, it becomes critical to have ways to scale conversational help.”

Hamid continued by noting the AI-built conversation engine is going to be “woven directly into your service management,” and machine learning can help fuel the system by pinpointing patterns in a customer’s data based on their request history.

Upscaling across the globe

Australia, countries in the European Union, the U.S. and Germany will be covered by Jira Service Management for the core features Opsgenie, Assets and Forms.

Atlassian’s new strategy for Jira Service Management

During a press briefing on December 6, Redfern explained how Jira Service Management is focusing more on IT service management “beyond the technical team.” This includes teams like human resources, marketing and finance. Part of Atlassian’s new strategy is to find easier ways for these other teams to streamline IT requests.

Atlassian is also taking into account the current economic climate of uncertainty and careful budgets by offering new incentives for enterprise and SMB teams. Jira Service Management’s new features are a response to the increasingly remote work landscape that was accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which many companies are facing more IT requests from hybrid and remote workers.

There are macro forces at work in today’s business world, such as the rising cost of ITSM software.

“We see people overpaying for what they actually need,” Redfern said.

For instance, Redfern noted that Gartner recently reported 80% of businesses are overspending on ITSM, buying features that aren’t actually essential.

“That adds up to about $2 billion in overspending that really businesses can’t afford,” he continued.

Jira Service Managment’s new features help bridge the gap between teams

“We’re bringing development and operations teams even closer together, and our goal there is to give these teams autonomy to build processes the way that they see fit,” Redfern said.

Hamid seconded Redfern’s point.

“Rather than trying to standardize one service management platform across all of these different teams, we really believe in this concept of autonomy,” Hamid said. “We want teams to work with the tools that work best for them.”

“The world is really changing,” Redfern said. “We’ve got the rise of the digital businesses and remote distributed teams. They’re starting to challenge those traditional norms of how teams work together.”

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