A match made in heaven: Insight Asset Management and Jira Service Management

It's every IT team's goal to provide high quality and professional services to their internal and external customers. The digital transformation, however, can put a lot of pressure on these teams, as IT Service Management is becoming increasingly important. This increased pressure can make it quite challenging to maintain a good balance between the quantity of work that is done while also delivering quality work.

Automating repetitive tasks in your processes can save engineers a significant amount of valuable time. This frees them to spend time on tasks that can't (or shouldn't) be automated because of their complexity or the need for "a human touch". When more time is left for these kinds of tasks, you can really start delivering excellent quality work to your customers. So which processes should you automate? This blog provides you with an example of a case where I applied automation to streamline the onboarding process for one of our customers. 

The case

The customer in question had been using Jira Software and Jira Service Management for quite some time. Increasingly more of their IT processes were handled via central Service Management projects. They wanted to look at the possibilities of moving their onboarding process to Jira too.

Before moving, this whole process was handled entirely via e-mail. They wanted to move to a Jira Service Management request template and integrate the allocation of assets, such as laptops, to the new employee.

There was already a Jira Software project in place, 'Asset Management', in which Jira issues were created for all kinds of IT assets, such as laptops and phones. When a new employee went into the onboarding process, IT would look at this project for an available laptop, and update the Jira Software issue with the new employee. As this was all done manually, there was a high risk of someone forgetting to update the Jira issue, or updating it incorrectly. This meant that the data could become out-of-date and untrustworthy. There was also a need to integrate an incoming onboarding request with the asset management solution.

In an ideal situation, agents don't have to leave the Service Management request to lookup the availability of laptops. It's more efficient to have it all integrated within a Service Management workflow. 

Automating the onboarding process

To optimize and automate this process, we started with the implementation of Insight Asset Management for Jira. This powerful add-on by Riada unleashes the power of asset management within the Atlassian platform. It provides a modern CMDB (configuration management database) used to manage any type of structured data. You can use the Insight platform to manage all the things that are important to your organization whether it’s hardware, software, people, facilities, compliance, customers, contracts or any other type of data. In this case, we used this add-on to manage the organization's laptops (amongst other assets). After configuring this add-on in Jira, it was easy to find an overview of all the available laptops (see below). 

Moving the assets from issues in a Jira project to the Insight add-on, with its object attributes, relations, and graphical overviews, made the overview rich, structured and clear. We weren't done though, as we had to integrate this magnificent thing into our Service Management workflow. Take a look at the screen recording below. With a well-thought-out workflow with conditions, validators, and post-functions in the right place, you can really automate the way agents handle an onboarding request.

Integrating the allocation of a new laptop into the Service Management workflow not only provides you with an efficient (and automated!) way for an agent to complete the task. It also ensures that your asset attributes, such as status and users, are updated correctly, every time a laptop is allocated to a new employee. This ensures correct data, which makes your asset data reliable, which also improves efficiency. 

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