Is Jira an ITSM tool?

In a word, yes. Jira Service Management (JSM) is a service management solution for any team, including IT. As an IT service management (ITSM) tool, Jira Service Management can be used by companies looking to optimize and formalize how their IT teams deliver IT services to employees and customers.  

JSM helps IT teams establish an effective service request process, address downtime, collaborate more effectively, and fulfill service requests in a timely manner. The tool enables IT teams to provide end-to-end services to internal and external customers. Using JSM, IT teams can transform how they function and power broader digital transformation initiatives across the entire organization. 

What is ITSM?

IT service management (ITSM) is a general term describing the strategic approach to designing, delivering, managing, and improving how a business uses technology for IT services. ITSM focuses more on customer needs and technology services than on the technology itself. 

For example, understanding the requirements of internal and external customers, then finding the right tech to offer a solution. You’re not just evaluating technology based on its specs. 

Think of it as delivering IT or technology as a service to support improved organizational performance and customer satisfaction. ITSM goes beyond traditional IT support and evaluation. It encompasses the processes and tools IT teams use to manage the technology used across the organization. No matter what kind of business you’re in, ITSM is the key to your success. 

What is an ITSM tool?

An IT service management tool is (usually) a software application or platform used to consolidate and support your ITSM processes into one efficient workflow, for example, Jira Service Management. ITSM tools tend to offer the following features:

Service management

Keep your team on task and on deadline with the ticketing features ITSM tools offer. They help organize and manage service tickets and requests, prioritizing them, and optimizing the entire service process. 

Analytics and insight management 

These features help you discover actionable insights from your data through dashboards. Many tools also let you customize these dashboards for your needs, giving you even more relevant insights. 

Organizational governance

The top ITSM tools help you implement and enforce IT policies across the organization to better manage modern IT challenges such as remote work, distributed teams, and cross-team collaboration. Use them to streamline policy, contract compliance, and manage organizational structure. 

Time and asset management

Because the IT team’s sphere of influence expands beyond IT, it can be challenging to get visibility into all the apps and solutions in place across the organization. Use an ITSM tool to gain end-to-end visibility of IT assets, track license or seat usage, and maintain control of IT costs. 

Can you use Jira for ITSM?

Absolutely! Jira Service Management supports many of the workflows and processes today’s digital-forward companies use. JSM gives you a flexible template to serve as a foundation for your ITSM workflows, so you can follow ITSM best practices easily. 

It also offers support for many Agile-based approaches and methodologies. Jira Service Management is even officially certified as ITIL® compatible by Pink Elephant, the world’s leading IT service management education and consulting provider for several ITIL 4 practices, including IT asset management, knowledge management, change management, service catalog management, and service configuration management. 

By default, JSM projects include a service catalog, ITIL workflows, and customizable business intelligence reports that provide advanced insights. It also integrates neatly with a Confluence knowledge base and any cloud-ready apps from the Atlassian Marketplace, enabling you to extend its features and functionality for your company’s unique needs. 

8 ways to use Jira Service Management for ITSM

Here are eight ways you can use Jira Service Management for ITSM across your company. 

1. Customize your ITSM

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to ITSM. The beauty of Jira Service Management is that it can be customized to suit the needs of your business, teams, and customers. You never want your ITSM team’s productivity and responsiveness hampered because a tool has limited functionality.

2. Empower IT and support teams 

Improve resolution times by using automation tools, like JMWE and HelpDesk+, in Jira Service Management to eliminate manual and repetitive tasks. This enables teams to focus on more important work.

3. Automate incident management

Jira offers a powerful suite to prioritize, respond to, and analyze incidents swiftly and effectively. It can assess various issues, from ones needing only a single team member to solve to organization-wide interruptions that need all hands on deck. By constantly monitoring your networks, Jira automatically notifies the relevant on-call team, who can then use Jira Service Management to link issues and set priority levels for the incident, all in the same tool. 

4. Get more visibility into any problem or fix

Jira gives IT teams more visibility into all areas of a diagnosed problem so they can find post-incident reviews, developer backlogs, and other help tickets to see if anyone is already working on a fix. If there’s no fix happening yet, they can create a change ticket and kickstart that process. The cross-team visibility reduces redundant work, enables teams to apply existing workarounds if applicable, and gives you a more accurate picture of the costs incurred by any given incident, its workarounds, and fixes. You can even use the post-mortem template in Whiteboards to reflect on an incident and prevent it from happening again. 

5. Learn more about your IT assets

Jira Service Management includes features to track IT assets throughout their lifecycle, including hardware and software. Your company will be able to see at a glance what assets you have, where they are, and how they function. The Assets and Inventory Plugin for Jira offers added features such as built-in asset definitions so you can start tracking your assets from day one, view detailed asset reports, and manage assets across Jira Service Management and Jira Software for cross-team collaboration. Companies use this app to optimize asset management, improve compliance, develop life cycle workflows, and reduce costs. 

6. Improve collaboration and communication

Service management is inherently “messy” because it tends to span siloed departments like IT, support, development, and engineering. It also tends to span across different platforms including Jira Service Management, Jira Software, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, for example. Tools like Dashboard Hub provide teams with a complete view and consolidated reporting hub across JSM, Jira Software, Statuspage, Opsgenie, Insight, Confluence, and Bitbucket to give a holistic view of ITSM across your organization and improve collaboration.

7. Improve the customer experience

Jira Service Management provides a customer portal people can use to submit and track service requests. This is useful for external customers who might otherwise think their requests go into a black hole because they’re never updated on the status (or getting an update is more trouble than it’s worth.) This self-service portal reduces the time and effort customers spend trying to get help and improves their satisfaction with your service and company.

8. Use Jira for non-IT teams

Jira Service Management brings an end-to-end toolset that companies can use to support non-IT teams delivering services to the company too. HR, facilities, sales, marketing, and any other team can use it to manage their internal service desks, IT assets, role-based automation, service level agreements (SLAs), and communication. It offers numerous default configuration sets that align with these different teams, making it easy to deploy anywhere across the company. 

Learn more about ITSM and Appfire ITSM Solutions

ITSM teams are constantly under pressure to build, implement, and maintain the foundational IT technologies of today’s companies, while also finding new ways to scale more quickly and cost-effectively. That’s where Appfire’s ITSM solution comes in.  

Appfire offers a powerful solution that enables IT teams to: 

• Keep up with growing demand and remove process bottlenecks
• Increase IT scalability and reliability
• Improve service quality
• Customize, automate, and govern your ITSM tech stack
• Enforce audit and compliance guidelines
• Empower better collaboration and communication

To unlock the power of Jira for ITSM across your organization, contact an Appfire partner today. We’ve got the right partners and apps to set you up with a suite of Jira- and Atlassian- powered solutions that’ll optimize and modernize ITSM within your organization.

Last updated: 2023-06-05

Jira Misc Workflow Extensions Assets and Inventory Plugin for Jira 

Jira Service Management