Is Jira Service Desk the Most Advanced IT Service Management Software on the Market?

In today’s workplace where almost every task is done with the help of technology, IT downtime is a very unwanted yet widespread business issue. Whenever a server, desktop, or any business hardware or software malfunctions, processes are abruptly stopped, causing delays and losses. Thanks to reliable tools like IT service management systems, anything IT can be well maintained and managed, thereby ensuring business process continuity.

In this post, we’ll try to answer the oft-repeated question: Is Jira Service Desk the most advanced IT service management software on the market? We’ll examine its key features and benefits to know if it’s really the most sophisticated tool or not. 

Businesses nowadays are increasingly reliant on the availability of their IT infrastructure. This is why IT availability has become a vital requirement for every business. However, it is also one of the most difficult to maintain.

A single IT downtime can have significant adverse impacts on any business. In fact, a 2019 LogicMonitor study reports that the six biggest costs due to IT outage are lost productivity, lost revenue, mitigation costs, compliance costs, decreased stock price, and damage to the brand.

In addition, the study found that around half of all IT-related downtimes can be avoided. It likewise found that businesses with persistent IT outages suffer 16 times more in terms of lost productivity than those with fewer downtimes.

An earlier ITIC survey on downtime costs and IT reliability found that 98% of companies with over a thousand employees, one hour of IT downtime costs them over $100,000 on average. So what must a business do to avoid or minimize frequent IT outages?

To prevent downtime, it’s essential to understand its root causes. In the same LogicMonitor study, IT decision-makers cited the top two missed opportunities for avoiding downtimes. These are failing to detect when the usage trend is going extremely high or when both hardware and software performance trends are declining consistently.

It’s no wonder why companies are increasingly relying on IT downtime prevention solutions like IT service management tools to address this critical business need. But with so many such tools around, it is but reasonable to choose the best, most advanced tool for their business requirements.

Many business users and software review sites consider Jira Service Desk as the most advanced IT service management solution on the market. They must have some valid reasons to say so. But it’s best to first validate this common view, which is why we’ve evaluated Jira Service Desk for you in this post.

Overview of Jira Service Desk Management

Jira Service Desk is a comprehensive service desk platform for helping IT teams quickly address downtimes, collaborate better, and offer timely service. This ITSM platform is designed to provide end-to-end services to both internal and external customers. It also allows development, operations, and support teams to work together seamlessly in resolving IT issues.

At its core is a highly-sophisticated IT service management architecture. This empowers business users to frame their strategies that truly align with their business objectives and contextual requirements. It is configured to provide beyond basic ITSM functions—such as incident, change, and problem management—while offering a host of other relevant business capabilities.

Another reason why many regard Jira Service Desk as an advanced ITSM tool is that it allows businesses to access and use it with hundreds of great apps available on the Atlassian Marketplace. This means that you can easily integrate most of the business applications and productivity tools you and your teams have been using.

From collaboration software and project management tools to CRM apps, you can easily integrate whatever existing app you’re already using with Jira Service Desk. Moreover, its robust native mobile app can be used by anyone from your company—Legal, Facilities, HR, etc.—and receive the IT support they need, even when on-the-go.

What’s more, Jira Service Desk is known for its extreme flexibility. While most ITSM tools are available online, this platform also offers an on-premise deployment option. Further, there’s a Jira plan for any type of user in terms of cost. It offers a free plan for up to 3 agents, while paid plans start at $20 per user.

Here are the top 20 reasons why Jira Service Desk is considered by many business users as the most advanced IT service management software on the market.

What Makes Jira Service Desk the Most Advanced IT Service Management Software on the Market?

Incident Management

Its incident management dashboard allows users to resolve IT problems quickly with its detailed snapshot view of all current issues.

Jira Service Desk is a smart ITIL-certified ITSM solution that helps IT teams to quickly respond to, resolve, and constantly learn from every IT incident while simultaneously keeping all stakeholders updated.

1. Automation

One of Jira Service Desk’s advanced features is its smart automation capabilities. Users have the option to easily set up custom automation rules or even utilize integrated rules for managing all manual tasks.

With its automation tool, users can prioritize, assign, and escalate IT problems quickly, from inside or outside the company premises. Likewise, Admin users can categorize or close IT incidents using its automation feature.

2. Incident Communication & Alerts

Users are empowered to manage a transparent communications process with your internal and external customers. In turn, this helps foster trust with each incident using integration with Statuspage, Altassian’s status and incident communication tool.

Users can also take advantage of Jira’s integration with Opsgenie to allow effortless management of on-call schedules, even involving numerous teams. This allows the routing of notifications to the right team member as well as notifying responders via multiple channels. Moreover, you can automatically escalate alerts until action is made and collaborate on incidents as a single unit.

3. Post-Incident Reviews

Its integration with Opsgenie also allows you to monitor and evaluate all response activities. Jira enables users to establish areas of success, identify opportunities to do better as well as record that information, and share it with all stakeholders.

Once an incident is resolved, Jira users are automatically prompted to create a postmortem document.

Problem Management

Jira empowers users to easily document the root cause of an IT-related issue, fast.

Jira Service Desk allows businesses to control the effect of IT downtimes to a minimum. It also helps IT teams to identify the root cause and record information about problems and solutions.

4. Link to Dev Backlog

Using Jira Service Desk virtually allows users to take advantage of the entire Jira platform. For instance, by leveraging Jira’s extensive capabilities, business users can readily see what software teams have in their backlog that may be relevant to the IT issue.

5. Root Cause Analysis

To determine any recurring issues and begin to investigate the root cause, users only need to connect problem tickets to incident tickets. With this setup, users can quickly and easily document the root cause of an IT problem and more efficiently prevent similar causes of IT downtime.

All team members involved in the resolution of the Root Cause Issue are automatically alerted. This allows for the provision of quick insights into the downstream impact of their actions.

6. Reporting

IT teams can run reports to determine metrics and KPIs for providing actionable insights and for integration in business processes and knowledge base. Report details include the leading IT issues per month, the volume of incidents related to a problem record, and a whole lot more.

Service Request Management

You can easily customize Jira Service Desk’s service request dashboard to your specific needs and branding requirements.

Jira Service Desk enables your IT team to provide a world-class service experience. It also helps ensure that employees can find the information they need to get help fast.

7. Knowledge Base

To create an integrated knowledge base for your business, you only need to integrate Confluence to your Jira Service Desk. This facilitates the easy sharing of valuable information throughout your organization. Unique features such as macros, collaborative editing, and @ mentions make it easy for distributed teams to work together anytime, anywhere.

With its federated knowledge base, it becomes easy for any team member to search for any available information. When an employee searches for a keyword, the search query draws from multiple sources such as articles, request types, and service desks.

8. Service Level Agreements

You can create as many SLA policies as required to closely monitor deadlines according to request categories or elapsed time. Aside from resolving service requests based on priorities, you can also prevent SLA breaches by utilizing automated escalation rules to alert the right team members.

9. Self-Service Portal

With Jira’s self-service portal, you allow company stakeholders to search for answers to common questions on their own, at their convenient time. Jira’s advanced algorithm empowers users to leverage a knowledge base that intuitively comes up with relevant information according to the keywords they used.

Users can also utilize the self-service portal to quickly submit requests for help. Admins can even tailor the portal to match your branding requirements.

10. Agent Queues

This advanced ITSM tool provides readily configurable queues that agents can utilize for prioritizing, triaging, and assigning incoming service requests.

Knowledge Management

Jira Service Desk – Knowledge Management dashboard.

You can integrate Confluence to Jira Service Desk to create an integrated knowledge base that intuitively suggests the correct service and learns from each interaction so that solutions are simple to find.

11. Smart Search

Jira Service Desk is powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. This is why its self-service portal can enable users to research any information easier and faster for all stakeholders.

12. Post-Implementation Reviews

With Confluence, you can use Jira Service Desk for creating PIRs, runbooks, and other documents. You can also connect these knowledge base materials to service requests to keep customers updated.

13. Knowledge Reports & Scoring

Jira Service Desk also features article scoring, which occurs when users rate articles if they were able to provide help or not. With Jira’s article effectiveness and article usage tools, you can understand which articles are helping solve the most issues and identify which deflect the most requests.

It also offers CSAT reporting, which allows you to measure customer satisfaction. With this report, you can better understand your customers and enhance your service levels. Moreover, this ITSM platform offers a simple, integrated tool to gather customer feedback.

Asset Management

Jira Service Desk – Asset Management dashboard.

You can link your favorite IT asset management tool to reference, track, and tie requests with assets directly from Jira Service Desk.

14. IT Asset Tracking

With Jira Service Desk, IT teams can use their existing asset monitoring tool, monitor all IT assets, and link them to service requests within the platform.

15. Configuration Management Database

Aside from leveraging the Atlassian Marketplace, this ITSM allows business users to link their preferred CMDB to manage all valuable business information. These include contracts, contacts, facilities, hardware, software, etc.

Change Management

Jira makes change management seamless, accurate, and easy.

You can enhance the flow of changes to infrastructure and services with Jira Service Desk. While doing so, you can reduce risk to your business and boost service delivery.

16. Configurable Workflows

This advanced service desk solution allows users to easily create their operational workflows to better support all their automated ITSM-related activities. This way, potential bottlenecks are removed while at the same time systems are seamlessly connected to the right people.

This ITSM allows users to customize service delivery to your organization’s specific needs.

17. Change Approvals, Plans & Schedule

Jira Service Desk allows users to configure change approvals based on the type of change, which corresponds to the change protocols established by your change-advisory board. Using Confluence, users can create change documents for recording the implementation of tasks, risk assessment, and communication plan.

Likewise, users can integrate Jira with a calendar app to more efficiently manage upcoming service schedules and effortlessly identify conflict-free schedules.

18. Release & Deployment

Once a change is approved for implementation in Jira Service Desk, users can create a linked issue in the developer’s backlog in Jira Software to completely advance a fix through with speed and ease.

19. Configuration Management

Jira Service Desk enables users to quickly understand the impact and dependencies of any change through its advanced asset and configuration management feature.

Robust API

Jira Service Desk – API integration dashboard.

20. 200+ Integrations

Finally, you can integrate Jira Service Desk with the best of breed tools available on the Atlassian Marketplace to further leverage its already advanced features and capabilities. For instance, with Jira’s Opsgenie, you can integrate your ITSM with hundreds of the top collaboration, workflow, and project management tools.

You can optimize the possibilities of Jira Service Desk Connect and integrate it with all the business tools you’re already using. You can also build custom add-ons with its REST API and open platform to boost the power of your service desk.

Is Jira Service Desk the Right IT Service Desk Software For You?

The ultimate answer, of course, depends on you. If you’re looking for an IT service management software that can readily provide the exact ITSM that you need and much, much more, you won’t get short-changed with Jira Service Desk.

Jira Service Desk is a highly flexible, collaborative ITSM tool that is designed to provide everything your IT team needs to speed up service delivery and collaboration. The above discussed sophisticated features—and many other functions not discussed in this article—are more than enough to justify why many consider it as the most advanced ITSM tool on the market.

By Christopher Robinson

Christopher Robinson is a senior productivity research analyst who specializes in optimizing online collaboration and project management using Scrum and agile approaches. In his work, he always emphasizes the need for distributed work training and the formation of efficient work habits. His work was mentioned in various business publications, including Entrepreneur and InfoQ. He’s a strong proponent of the GTD model. He has been cooperating with the FinancesOnline team for 5 years now, and his publications always focus on practical aspects of productivity tools that can have an actual, transformative impact on a company.