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Atlassian / Jira Service Management
IT Service Management (ITSM) has become essential for the execution and maintenance of business processes. This is due in particular to the multi-layered penetration of IT in most areas of a company. In addition, parts of the service offering are often no longer handled purely in-house but outsourced to external IT service providers. This poses a number of challenges for both the IT department and the ITSM tool.
At our customer the Challenge to implement a modular solution to process IT requests in a structured manner and, if necessary, to forward them automatically to the service provider responsible.
Previously, there was no central service desk and all requests were reported to IT via e-mail or telephone. Furthermore, each incoming request had to be analyzed by an internal IT employee and, if necessary, manually forwarded to the respective service provider. This required a considerable amount of time.
The goal was to present all IT services via a user-friendly web portal in order to enable internal employees to enter service requests in a targeted manner via a uniform web interface.
When entering a service request, the employee should not have to know whether the ticket has to be processed by internal IT or by an external service provider.
Furthermore, the status of requests should be transparent and traceable for employees and also enable contextual communication within a ticket.
Since parts of the 1st and 2nd level support are outsourced to various external service providers, bidirectional e-mail interfaces of the internal IT service management system with the respective external ticket systems of the service providers had to be created.
Depending on the type of request, the ticket is either routed to the responsible service provider via these automated interfaces or processed within the internal service layer.
When forwarding to an externally connected ticket system, all information entered by the requester is transmitted modularly via the interface.
If the service provider now processes the ticket, an "External ticket number" is transferred to Jira Service Management and this is enriched as a reference in the associated internal ticket.
Based on this reference, a clear link between the internal and external ticket systems has now been created. Furthermore, external service providers can initiate status changes in the outbound ticket via comments without actually having access to the internal system. Thus, tickets are always synchronized and up to date in the service provider's system as well as in the outbound system.
The interfaces have also been designed in a modular way so that another external partner can be added quickly and easily or, if necessary, replaced. This flexible approach enables good scalability of the system and a sustainable solution for the customer.
In the course of the project, it turned out that the customer was already using a tool that reads out active computer accounts and assigns them to the corresponding Windows users. In order to provide the IT staff with an even better basis of information per request, we decided together with the customer to transfer this information into the IT service management system.
The goal was to automatically read out the respective computer account based on the creator of a service request and assign it to the ticket. Consequently, the following additional information is now available to the ticket processor without having to obtain it from the requester.
To enrich the information in Jira, a SQL Postgres database was implemented as middleware, which retrieves the data from the SQL database at regular intervals. This data is transferred to Jira via webhook in "Insights" objects, where it is tracked and regularly updated.
This additional implementation rounds off the customer's IT service management solution and guarantees comprehensive, structured and sustainable processing of all future IT requests.
If you are interested or have ideas to improve your IT service management layer or to initiate a new one, please feel free to contact us and we will discuss your project in a first personal meeting without any obligation.
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