Previously, we looked at why digital asset management is important for your organization. Today, we're exploring Atlassian's solution for tracking your organization's valuable assets digitally: Insight. Remember, we are defining assets as anything that helps you get work done: lab equipment, computer hardware, cloud infrastructure, mobile devices, software/SaaS licenses, tools, work stations, furniture, etc.

In our industry, digital asset management is usually thought of as a component of "service management." Service management was traditionally considered an IT function (often manifested in the form of an IT help desk). In recent years, however, we have been implementing these practices across the organization—from legal to human resources to finance—because they dramatically increase the speed and quality of how work flows.

This expansion of service management practices beyond the IT organization means more teams are taking advantage of Atlassian's asset management tool, Insight. The impact of this trend is often quite remarkable as processes are formalized, streamlined, and consistently monitored. Teams using Insight get additional process benefits. Unlike inflexible, legacy Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs), Insight uses an open data structure which allows your teams to manage any resource important to their service requests. Including assets in your service management practices is a big step forward.

Think about how work gets done in any part of your organization: your process workflows. It typically starts with the (internal or external) customer submitting a service request, like a new employee onboarding, a facility request, a contract review, etc... The request is picked up from the queue by an agent who will take actions to move the work forward to resolution. Many actions may be needed along the way: obtaining additional information, forwarding to another team, making a configuration change, creating an account, procuring a requested item, repair equipment, provide updates back to the requester, etc. These actions are all turbo-charged and made easier through Jira's functionality and built-in fields. But is there something missing? Yes, assets! Almost every request involves procuring, repairing, replacing, upgrading, decommissioning, or dealing with assets in some way. A Jira issue, by default, doesn't include fields to track data related to assets.

We could employ custom fields to create a drop-down list of assets, but we quickly run into limits with this approach. As discussed in the former post, assets usually have many attributes, such as serial numbers, vendor/service contacts, documentation, relationships to other assets, etc... There's no way to stuff all of this information into a custom field. Using multiple custom fields is cumbersome for agents and for reporting/tracking due to data entry accuracy issues. In addition, we can't establish relationships between assets represented in custom fields; these are important for being able to see all assets located in a certain location or seeing what other assets will be impacted by removing or changing an asset, for example. We need an integrated solution that's tailored to managing our assets within Jira tickets.

Insight's basic functionality allows customers and agents to link an issue to a complete, dynamic asset record. This is incredibly powerful by itself, but that's not all: with asset management handled by Insight, we can do so much more to help work flow smoothly as part of digital transformation initiatives. Insight can automate ticket assignment based on any asset attribute, like location, model, or vendor. This prevents front-line support from spending time reassigning tickets to the appropriate queue and removes that wait from the request's resolution time. Alerts to stakeholders can be sent automatically. Should safety and engineering teams be alerted when tickets involving security systems, networking hardware or other critical infrastructure are opened? Automated discovery can be a crucial feature for audit/compliance and having an accurate picture of what assets are being used to in your business. We are amazed at the flexibility of Insight to help customers manage all of their needs around assets.

Are your assets managing you instead of the other way around? If so, get in touch, and let's apply the power of Insight to your business.

We're always looking for ways to keep track of our stuff, from old metal asset tags firmly glued to lids of the first "portable" computers to Apple's recent AirTag product release.

At work we call these "assets" because they cost money to acquire, maintain, replace, and are (hopefully) required for our organization's operation. (If assets are not being used, your digital asset management system should be highlighting that potential savings opportunity!) Keeping track of these items doesn't just make sense from a financial perspective, it's also required by law in many cases.

When it comes to asset management we're not just concerned with an item's current location. Surprisingly often, an asset's purchase price, age, vendor, warranty details, user assignment, support/maintenance contracts, service history, and any of hundreds of other details become critically important to keeping the asset—and therefore our business—running.

And we're not just talking about physical assets like desks, laptops, phones, tablets, tools, networking equipment, etc. The move to cloud means we can instantly deploy servers, licenses, and other IT infrastructure we'll never actually see or touch! How do I put an RFID tag on a cloud server?

With more devices and services being employed to operate our organizations every day, spreadsheets don't cut it. Given this amount of critical data to manage, the only way to keep up is to turn to digital transformation.

Traditional Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs)

The technology market has seen the introduction of many inflexible, expensive "solutions" to manage assets digitally. Traditional Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) have failed to deliver the necessary transformative power:

• IT is overpaying hundreds of millions of dollars in unused features in these legacy CMDB tools
• Customization requires specialized consultants (quickly adapting to the changing needs of the business is a core tenant of digital transformation)
• Legacy tools often result in slowing down the flow of work across teams instead of enhancing collaboration between them

Praecipio Consulting is transforming organizational service delivery with an Atlassian alternative built to deliver maximum value: Insight, now built into Jira Service Management. It is a modern, flexible digital asset management solution to easily define collaborative asset tracking that best fits your organization's needs, right in Jira.

Atlassian Service Management saves companies money by retiring their legacy tools. This explains why Atlassian is ranked as a strong performer in this market, having a strong strategy, and achieving a rapidly expanding market presence.

From employee and contractor onboarding to incident management to asset intelligence, Atlassian Insight for Jira Service Management can quickly get your digital asset tracking under control and flex to meet your constantly changing business.

Digital asset management done right doesn't just require the best-in-class solution, however. It's a cultural shift in the way IT is delivered as a service. Contact Praecipio Consulting to get started on your service delivery transformation now.

Atlassian Jira's a remarkably flexible tool. For most who hear “Jira,” things like issue tracking, project management, and software development come to mind. Very rarely do people think of ITIL in relation to Jira. But then again, many don’t know what ITIL is.

If you’re a developer or in IT and don’t know what ITIL is, you should. It’s a set of processes for managing lifecycles with relationships to one another. It’s the most widely-accepted approach to IT service management in the world – a set of best practices drawn from public and private sectors around the world. ITIL doesn’t just apply to IT service management (ITSM), though – it’s a reliable methodology for managing any type of complex technological process.

Jira’s an Atlassian tool that’s phenomenal at lifecycle management (workflows, custom fields, etc). It’s designed to be issue-centric, built around managing issues or bugs that pop up within a product or service’s lifecycle. This functionality extends far and wide when you expand how you define an “issue.” On the surface, an issue is more like a problem – but considering an issue’s attributes, it can easily qualify as a task or milestone. With that in mind, Jira can facilitate far more than simple issue tracking. It can support complex process lifecycles.

Every process is a web of highly dependent relationships between regular and conditional tasks – including ITIL processes like Incident Management and Problem Management. The huge breakthrough here is making Jira projects and workflows represent (and support) ITIL processes. Let’s take an incident for example. An incident goes through several states:

(1) detection and recording
(2) classification and initial support
(3) investigation and diagnosis
(4) incident closure

A good Incident Management process within a good technology helps reduce meantime to recovery – i.e. recover from an incident. We all know how well Jira facilitates transitions and workflow. Let’s take it a step further…in ITIL-based Incident Management, we are supposed to designate incident ownership, actively monitor, track and communicate. BINGO! This what Jira does.

Let’s take this another step further. Problem Management is a process used to identify root cause to reduce the number of incidents – thereby increasing the meantime between failures. Using Jira, we can manage root cause analysis and associate the individual incidents (manifestations) back to the Problem Management record we’re analyzing. This ability to link records and collaborate makes Jira a great Problem Management solution. Add Confluence to the mix and the effectiveness is improved further.

Going another step further – having ITIL-based ITSM processes running in Jira alongside your organizations SDLC further helps IT align its capabilities to deliver the highest, best quality software and service delivery.

We’ve helped clients implement Jira to manage Incident Management, Change Management, Problem Management, Asset Management, Software Development, Testing… we love the Altassian products and so do our clients.