Jira Service Desk* is beloved by its users: Across industries, this IT service management (ITSM) solution helps IT departments deliver rapid service, increase their flexibility and engage in heightened collaboration.
It's an ITSM solution at its core, but its offerings appeal to departments beyond IT, as well—especially after some recent upgrades. Jira Service Desk now supports enterprise-wise service management, meaning it extends ITSM processes and tools across an enterprise to all teams. According to Forrester research, Jira Service Desk is being rapidly adopted by HR, facilities and procurement teams. And it’s helping to remove organizational silos and improve operational practices.
These changes were also made to help companies service their employees’ new and changing needs. Research from SHRM found that 67% of millennials judge their employers by their technological knowledge, and Gen Y employees feel similarly. These workers crave fast delivery service, exceptional user experience and ability to self-help and find information easily on their own. Jira Service Desk’s new upgrades appeal to these needs and, concurrently, helps companies adapt workflows to these new expectations.
Helping non-technical teams manage everyday, internal tasks
With the upgraded Jira Service Desk solution, business teams in departments like HR, legal and facilities have access to customizable, easy-to-design templates and workflows that strengthen and speed up their internal processes. For example, HR teams can take a more coordinated approach to onboarding employees. Inside their Jira Service Desk portal, the team can create forms with custom fields that collect all of the information necessary during the onboarding process, like a description of the hiree, their location, job title, pay grade and soon-to-be manager.
With these project tools in place, every action within an HR department, big or small, is visible to everyone in it. This prevents miscommunications, and allows teams to take a more collaborative approach to every initiative. And if employee information is missing, the system automatically notifies the project owners, ensuring nothing goes unchecked.
This kind of automation can be used in other non-technical departments, like legal. These teams can create custom templates that automate contract duties. Before they begin working on a new contract, the department that is requesting the contract has to provide them with some information, like a summary of its purpose and its level of priority. With the help of their portal, legal teams can also stop chasing down missing signatures—instead, Jira Service Desk automatically alerts the appropriate parties that they are missing.
Jira Service Desk also now gives approval capabilities to every department of an organization. This function allows team members in HR, legal or facilities departments to add or edit approvers, submit approval decisions, and track the status of an approval. What does this mean for the users? Requesting a new device or access to a database is no longer a complicated process. Now, via their portal, employees can simply submit a service ticket to the appropriate department and track the request until it receives approval. For instance, if someone from HR needs to reserve a conference room for an important meeting, they can simply put in a request to their facilities department through the Jira portal. Employees don’t have to send follow-up emails or make phone calls to confirm the room—they will be notified automatically.
Appealing increasingly remote and tech savvy workforces
Employee demographics are changing—younger generations in the workforce are more comfortable with remote work lifestyles and technological advancements. To appeal to this new demographic, organizations have started adding mobile capabilities to many of their platforms, since 60% of employees already use apps for work-related activity, and 75% of Americans use their smartphones most often to check their work email.
In response to these new trends, Jira Service Desk now offers a mobile app, called Jira mobile app, that easily connects remote teams across all departments—from marketing and HR to legal—with their IT teams. For example, if a remote employee’s laptop crashes, the employee can alert the IT department from their phone and put in a request for a new one.
Jira Service Desk has also improved its knowledge base search experience so that it allows for more self-help. This is an important quality among younger, more tech savvy generations: 73% of today’s consumers believe that they should have the ability to solve most product and service issues on their own. Jira has also added a knowledge base reporting feature that measures the impact of a company’s knowledge base. This information informs IT team members about which troubleshooting guides are accessed the most (and least) and can update their knowledge bases accordingly.
Through its recent upgrades, Jira Service Desk is more accessible and easier to use for employees in every department. This type of IT is no longer exclusive to IT departments—it has been transformed into an enterprise-wide service management solution that can help organizations streamline workflows, automate manual tasks, and adjust to the ever-changing—and increasingly remote—workplace.
*Jira Service Desk is now called “Jira Service Management”