Case: Atlassian
Global IT Service Management with common direction at ISS
Over the past 30 years, ISS has quadrupled in size. The many new employees have brought their favorite tools with them, resulting in a growing set of disconnected technologies and operational roadblocks.
SERVICES
- Jira Service Management (JSM)
- Jira Software (JSW)
- Confluence
- Bitbucket
- Bamboo
- Automation for Jira
Introduction
ISS is a global market leader in facility services with nearly half a million employees and more than 60,000 customers worldwide. Over the past 30 years, ISS has quadrupled in size. The many new employees have brought their favorite tools with them, resulting in a growing set of disconnected technologies and operational roadblocks.
As the company grew, it became more difficult to collaborate across departments, stay aligned and deliver on their promises and expectations.
To support continued growth and ensure a more consistent and predictable service experience, ISS wanted to further develop their IT service management and unify the organization around a common platform.
Development areas
As part of this further development, ISS identified the following areas of potential:
- Need one global ITSM setup instead of many local solutions
- Visibility across support, operations and development teams
- Eliminate manual workflows and dependency on email, spreadsheets and legacy systems
- Want more efficient incident, request and change management
- Need for better collaboration with external suppliers
Access
Faced with a massive undertaking, ISS chose to analyze potential solutions. They found that “Atlassian products were competitively priced and offered a rich ecosystem that could not be matched elsewhere,” says Marie Bjørke, Head of IT Service Management.
That’s why they turned to Aety for help with implementation and further development. With Aety’s customization, easy set-up, high availability and integration across the entire product life cycle, ISS supports process improvements and centralizes collaboration for over 400,000 employees and salespeople, creating a solid infrastructure for future growth.
The approach was deliberately incremental and flexible. Together, ISS and Aety started with a proof of concept for an IT service desk and then gradually expanded the solution as the value became clear to the organization
The total solution included, among other things:
- Jira Service Management as a single point of entry for service requests
- Jira Software for development and improvement tasks
- Confluence as a knowledge and documentation platform
- Automated workflows that tied ITSM and development closely together
This approach made it possible to standardize processes globally – while allowing local teams to adapt the solution to their needs.
How to proceed
The approach was deliberately incremental and flexible. Together, ISS and Aety started with a proof of concept for an IT service desk and then gradually expanded the solution as the value became clear to the organization. This approach made it easier to test solutions, see the impact and identify potential improvements before moving forward.
Building on the phased implementation, ISS went on to roll out the Atlassian platform widely, implementing Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Bitbucket, Bamboo and Confluence.
ISS particularly highlighted Aety’s flexible approach as a strength, as it allowed each team to start small and expand the solution according to their needs and maturity.
Customized for local teams, standardized for global organizations
When ISS empowered teams to explore new service improvements themselves, the Atlassian platform was quickly adopted across the organization. The need was common: to gather requests, tasks and collaboration in one place rather than working in email, spreadsheets and manual processes.
Jira Service Management was particularly popular, allowing employees, suppliers and partners to easily request help and track status. At the same time, several business areas used the platform to further develop their own processes.
Including:
- IT modernized their ITSM practices
- Finance in UK unified handling of invoice and payment inquiries
- HR adopted the platform for onboarding and automating employee-related requests.
- Regional teams have subsequently expanded the solution further – including fully automated flows in Germany, integrated with SAP and SCCM.
To ensure consistency across countries and functions, Aety established a common playbook that supports standardization and enables continuous roll-out to new teams and countries.
The results
- Global standardization: One common ITSM system used across employees, suppliers and customers worldwide
- Increased transparency and overview: Full visibility into incidents, requests and changes across teams and suppliers - supported by common dashboards and real-time data.
- Faster resolution of critical incidents: Significant reduction in critical incident handling time - from days to hours - through better prioritization and automation.
- Enhanced collaboration between operations and development: Close coupling between Jira Service Management and Jira Software has made it easier to coordinate tasks and work cross-functionally without complex integrations.
- Scalable platform for the future: A robust and flexible solution that already supports more than 80,000 service requests annually and can easily be rolled out to new countries and functions.
Pictures of the ISS setup
