Unlock the Atlassian and Isos Technology podcast to hear digital transformation experts discuss how Atlassian Jira Service Management enables greater operational resilience, stronger compliance and better mission outcomes. Discover how to align people and processes by using strategic change management to overcome cultural resistance and ensure modernization leads to scalable, long-term mission success.
[Anthony Jimenez]
Welcome back to Carahcast, the podcast from Carahsoft, the trusted government IT solutions provider. Subscribe to get the latest technology updates in the public sector. I'm Anthony Jimenez, your host from the Carahsoft production team.
On behalf of Atlassian, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast. Focused around modernizing fragmented legacy ITSM environments, we explore how federal agencies can overcome visibility gaps and compliance risks to achieve better mission outcomes. Joining us today from Isos's Technology and Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner are Lia Wood, Director of Enterprise Solutions, and Nick Nader, Senior Solution Engineer.
Together they will discuss how aligning people, process, and technology alongside the strategic use of AI can turn complex digital transformations into scalable long-term success stories.
[Lia Wood]
Thank you so much, everybody, for listening today. My name is Lia Wood. I'm the Director of Enterprise Solutions at Isos's Technology, and I'm joined by...
[Nick Nader]
Nick Nader. I'm a Senior Solution Engineer at Isos's Technology.
[Lia Wood]
Today we're going to be talking about modernizing ITSM in federal government environments. Right now, the federal government is more than ever looking at mission readiness, going through compliance pressure. There is a position that they need to transition to cloud and actually increase, or excuse me, decrease their operational resilience.
As I mentioned, Nick is our Solutions Engineer here at Isos's and has definitely been focused on ITSM transformations within our organization and our client base. We want to make sure that today you understand that we are talking very specifically about federal ITSM and what that looks like within that space, what's broken, what works, and kind of where it's going. So very quickly, I want to make sure that I introduce Isos's Technology and who we are.
We were founded in 2005 as a custom software development company, writing custom software for clients. Day two of opening our doors, we purchased those Atlassian tools, JIRA and Confluence, to manage that consulting practice, and through transparency with our clients, really started introducing them to the tool set. So it was very organic how we became an Atlassian-focused organization.
We have a dedicated vertical to the federal business, so it's a very important aspect of what our focus is day to day here at Isos's. What works within the federal department, or excuse me, the Department of Defense, and what also works on the commercial side, go hand in hand. So we can definitely take some of the learnings from commercial and apply them in the federal space as well.
One of the main things that we like to say is that we don't just deploy tools, we design around particular agency workflows. So Nick, when we talk about federal ITSM, what's the first thing we look at?
[Nick Nader]
That's a great question. We look at problems. So just like in the commercial enterprise space, in the federal space, we try to assess what the organization's problems are, and we do that by having conversations with the stakeholders at the agencies and the different offices within the agencies, and basically ask them what their major pain points are, what are their large organizational problems that they're trying to solve with the tools, and then we can go from there through extensive discovery sessions with those stakeholders, with end users, to try to determine what those problems actually are and what a solution would be to solve them.
[Lia Wood]
So for the state of ITSM in the government right now, let's talk about what we actually typically see. What does a legacy ITSM environment actually look like?
[Nick Nader]
Yeah, so essentially, legacy ITSM environments tend to be a collection of disparate tools that handle portions of IT service management or contract management, so things like your software for their engineering teams, ServiceNow for IT service management, spreadsheets, emails, PowerPoints, kind of stuff all over the software ecosystem, and that's kind of a problem for getting visibility. It's a problem for actual prioritization of tasks and requests. There's no clear metrics for them to track that kind of stuff across those different tools, so this tends to introduce risk around compliance and risk around auditing is also a visibility issue.
When you don't have visibility, you can't audit that system, so multiple disconnected systems introduces request black hole, as we like to say, and that tends to highlight a lot of compliance and data regulation risk.
[Lia Wood]
Well, and it sounds like it highlights inefficiencies within that particular set of it's harder to roll up reporting, it's harder to understand, and it also is going to impact leadership visibility into what...
[Nick Nader]
Exactly.
[Lia Wood]
Yeah.
[Nick Nader]
Yes, and lack of visibility for the actual end users requesting help, but also like you said, no visibility or holistic view of the progress against those requests for leadership, so they don't know how well their help desk team is doing, they don't know how quickly they're resolving requests, they don't know how quickly they're squashing incidents and bugs and things like that.
[Lia Wood]
Which is a problem. Okay, perfect. So that actually will lead us into the conversation of why do your service management?
Why should federal governments be looking at, parts of the federal government be looking at GSM?
[Nick Nader]
Yeah, so JIRA service management is going to differ from your other leaders in the space like ServiceNow and BMC, because it is built on the foundation of JIRA. So it has all of those core fundamental principles of like your traditional JIRA software projects have, so same kinds of configurations, but then layered on top of that you have help desk specific functionality, ITSM specific functionality. So it is flexible like a traditional JIRA space is.
So you can apply things like a facilities process workflow or an HR process workflow for onboarding and offboarding to that fundamental configuration, but then get all the benefit of your help desk functionality, your change management functionality, peripherals like asset management and operations are all part of that same core license and same space configuration, just layered on top of that foundation. So when you look at those small efficiencies or you're looking to fix small inefficiencies, you have things like self-service in that customer portal.
You have automated workflows on the internal side for agents to be handling things more quickly and resolving tickets more quickly. You have SLA metrics that are granular and specific to the different types of requests coming in so that you can actually get visibility into how quickly you resolve those things and how well oiled of a machine your help desk team is. You have a knowledge base and confluence that's attached with a bunch of documentation that helps that self-service, and then you have some more fancy things like asset management for IT employee assets, for contract lifecycle management, for personnel management, for procurement and facilities management, right?
So a lot of aligning the tools to that federal agency's processes rather than the other way around, right? We want to make sure that we're actually solving the problems that those federal agencies have, not just creating a configuration that is there. We want to be solving the problems.
[Lia Wood]
It's a lot to take in. That sounds like there's a lot of capabilities that are associated with the tool. When we're talking about creating small wins and fixing small inefficiencies, what type of admin are we looking at with this?
Is this something where you need to learn how to code or is it simplistic in use for the audience to understand?
[Nick Nader]
Yeah, so it's definitely not a type of administrator that needs to be a Python or a C++ expert. You have a lot of low-code, no-code options. The majority of the configurations in anybody's JIRA tenant are going to be UI configurations that are low-code or no-code.
Obviously, when you get to fancy things like custom scripting, you're usually in the realm of filling gaps in the processes that the core JIRA products don't handle. But 99% of what you're doing within a JIRA service management implementation is going to be no-code for the most part. And then you can do some fun things that are low-code with webhooks when you start to touch external platforms.
But yeah, we'll set up the vast majority of these processes, these life cycles, and management systems with no-code at all.
[Lia Wood]
Love hearing that, which actually brings me to security. That's going to be a big thing. You talk about integrating with external systems.
What specifically about the JIRA service management platform, from a regulatory perspective, how does JIRA service management fit those requirements within the federal government now?
[Nick Nader]
Yeah, and it really depends on whether you're talking about an on-prem environment like Data Center, where they have full control over their environment. They're hosting it themselves on an AWS cloud, a government cloud, or an Azure government cloud, or they just have it on their own servers because they have the infrastructure already in place. Obviously, in that scenario, you're going to have a lot of options in security, right?
And you're going to rely on that client's security team, for the most part, to meet the compliance and data regulations that are necessary for their agency. But Atlassian is now pushing towards that Atlassian GovCloud space. They've got Atlassian GovCloud available now.
They're getting clients in there. They're expanding the functionality of their Atlassian GovCloud, which is currently FedRAMP moderate approved, and working towards that FedRAMP high authorization as well. And then they also have what they call Isoslated cloud, which is going to be a tenant separate from all of their commercial clients, not quite FedRAMP high or FedRAMP moderate, but your own personal Isoslated cloud version of that.
So you're going to start to see them meeting FedRAMP moderate, of course, and FedRAMP high, but then a lot of the other compliance and regulatory certifications that are necessary for the different federal agencies.
[Lia Wood]
That's awesome. There's a lot to unpack there, too. When we're talking about getting this all done, I think one of the more important things to focus on, too, are, you know, we talk about what we can do all day, but really the impact of all of this comes from stories in the field of where we've seen things be more exciting for these agencies.
So you know, what we hear all the time, I think, in the field is a lot of service now, and that because of their regulatory certifications that they have currently, we see a lot more service now within a federal government space. But I know for both of us, we've seen an uptick in people moving out of Snow and into JSM. So let's talk about replacing service now.
Where is that happening? Why do you see that happening the most?
[Nick Nader]
Yeah, I mean, we obviously see it a lot within the enterprise commercial space, and now within the public sector space, moving away from service now because of licensing costs, but also kind of that implementation and configuration lift that comes with service now, right? It's got a lot of modules, but it tends to be pretty heavy to implement all those modules, right? So it's a pretty slow time to value.
And their advantage within the space as a leader is really dwindling now that your service management is on a federal and moderate AGC environment. It's meeting all of these compliance and regulatory bodies that are necessary for federal agencies to be on it. And JSM can have a very quick time to value because it can improve some of those processes from a tool like service now, when they have extensively built out like poor intake forms.
Like I know we did this with an independent federal agency coming from service now, where they had hundreds of application access forms, one for each application. And we were able to consolidate those into something a lot more conditionalized within Jira Service Management's portal. They had manual approvals going on, which we can handle by automating that by syncing with an IDP or identity provider through Atlassian Guard and starting to use kind of those interdependencies and connections between me as an individual contributor and a manager that is my approver, can kind of start to automate those approvals with that automation engine as well.
So automated processes like that, as well as other processes that their agents went through started to stack up all of these efficiencies that started to provide quite a lot of value very quickly just because they're inherently part of that JSM platform and that tool. So things like centralized portal access, so facilities and procurement and contract management and your normal IT support all being in the same place rather than going to multiple places is also a huge benefit that we see as we get into these federal agencies that are handling those and a lot of different tools that JSM can do all in one holistic place.
[Lia Wood]
Amazing. So the next example that we know from the field is the story of the US Air Force, their 90th Cyberspace Ops Squadron. This one was really complex.
There was a multi-team, multi-cyber operations going on. Tell us what happened and what stood out within this particular project.
[Nick Nader]
Yeah, so this squadron, they had a lot of tickets that were getting lost in their kind of complex approval chain. So we really needed to map that approval chain and make it more automated so that they knew exactly where in the approval process it was and tickets weren't getting lost and notifications for those approvals were sent out automatically. There was a procurement disconnect with their IT service management help desk, which is a huge headache when you have to go over to a different platform for procurement.
So we essentially went in and kind of did discovery and mapped out all of their kind of inter-department, inter-office workflows that worked across those tools, made sure we understood what that workflow was from start to finish for them, and then essentially codified that workflow within Jira Service Management and automated as much of that approval process and notification process as we could so that they had kind of this single pane of glass view into any of their tickets that are going through their approval chain at any given time with integrated procurement lifecycle management in Jira Service Management so that they weren't going to a separate tool for that. So they had full end-to-end visibility for that approval chain.
They had automated triggers as they got to those approval statuses and as they got out of those approval statuses. So it was much more transparent on where all of the tickets were in the process as well as very predictable, right? So they knew how many they could get through and how long it took to get through approval because they had those custom-built SLAs for time to approve and time to review those various types of requests coming in.
[Lia Wood]
That's important and impressive in so many different ways. And just to make sure that everybody understands, because everything we're talking about sounds really complex, this is all native functionality that we're talking about within the tool, too, right?
[Nick Nader]
It is, yeah. And when we mentioned things like the only thing that isn't like, hey, this is out of the box, like right when you sign up, you get it, is things like that automation, right? That automation and the customized workflows are something that you work with a solution partner like ourselves to make sure that we map that process into the tool, we create the right configurations for that, and then we create automation rules that really push that process along without any kind of manual intervention.
So yes, you're getting all of the functionality out of the box, but you definitely have to configure the tool to meet your process's needs and to actually solve those problems of the organization or the entity.
[Lia Wood]
Awesome. Thank you. Another topic that I thought was interesting for us to bring up from the field is going to be based on the Department of Defense contractor story that we have supporting 100,000 users, because I know this was a bunch of high volume, strict security type timeline.
What made this one unique?
[Nick Nader]
This one was interesting because they were supporting so many different military websites. It was like you mentioned, like 100,000 plus users that were submitting requests against the various websites. In enterprise commercial space, you can think of this like a complex service catalog, right?
You are supporting a couple dozen services through your help desk. For the DOD, it was we're supporting a couple dozen websites through our help desk with 100,000 end users of those websites. So they had legacy systems handling this at the time, and they had to customize that legacy system extensively to kind of meet the needs of all of those different various end users using their websites in all these different various ways, and that customization made it really hard to maintain, right?
Because the more you customize it, the more difficult it is to continue to scale it and maintain it on a day-to-day basis. It didn't have any integration with their existing tool set, so they had a lot of stuff within Jira software, and that legacy system didn't communicate with Jira software very well except for in a custom integration. So we basically moved all that legacy system to a full Jira service management implementation, so like a full cutover migration happened with pretty much no downtime or disruption to that production legacy environment, and with like full end user enablement for their 100,000 plus end users to get familiar with the new system.
So we applied some of those small efficiencies that we talked about earlier to this environment as well. So like prioritized queues based off of service level agreements, real-time dashboard reporting, a self-service confluence knowledge base so that those 100,000 end users that all ask the same question about those websites, you know, every week can answer it themselves and they don't have to actually have a human deal with that every single time. So this helped us kind of achieve a nice quick go-live because we did all of that implementation up front, we enabled users up front, and then we planned for that cutover.
We did change communication and change enablement, we did end user training, so it was very minimal disruption to their production environment because, you know, after when we were approaching that cutover weekend on that Friday, we were like, hey, you're going to sign out of your legacy system, and then you're going to sign into your new fancy Jira service management help desk portal on Monday, and they had kind of that change documentation in their knowledge base to support it so that when users did have questions on where to go for what kind of request in the new system, there was documentation that supported that. So they didn't get the, hey, where do I actually submit a request in their new help desk? It was more, hey, this is your knowledge base article on how you submit a new request in your help desk knowledge base.
So obviously you're getting better prioritization with those internal SLA queues, better visibility with that real-time dashboarding for leadership, and also better visibility for your end users because they have all of those requests out there in that customer portal, getting email notifications about them, and they can track them in real time and have that full transparency into where they're at in the process.
[Lia Wood]
I love that. And you touched on something that is so near and dear to my heart, which is change management and user adoption, because I think that is a piece and a component that gets overlooked when we're doing implementations and trainings. So describe for me a little bit, what do you think is the most important part of change management and how early in the process of a project or adopting a new tool set should you start incorporating understanding or even anticipation of user adoption and change management?
[Nick Nader]
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, there's a couple aspects to good change management, right? One is alignment to the leadership's vision or really the leadership's understanding of the problems of the body or the entity, right?
So when we do those extensive discovery sessions and we interview stakeholders, we get a great understanding of what problems we're actually trying to solve with the tooling, and then we enable them and help them define success criteria for that, right? All of that discovery into what the problem is and how they measure success for the engagement goes into the change management and change enablement so that when we get to that tail end, we can say, hey, these are the business problems that we're solving or the federal agency problems that we're solving. And this is how the configuration that we built, the implementation that we built solves those problems.
And then we get to the end user aspect of that, of this is how you use it to more easily get to your resolution, right, or more easily get to your success in your mind for the engagement. So it's all tied into change management from the beginning of the project all the way to the end. So you definitely need to consider it very early on in the engagement.
We talk about it very early on in our engagement. The process consulting that we do is really all for that change enablement as well as building the right solution to the problems so that we can build change documentation to say, hey, we built this in this way so that we're solving this problem that you described and your end users can then work in a more usable fashion from the help desk portal perspective. So user enablement is fed by that change enablement, which is fed by that discovery that we have with those initial stakeholders.
[Lia Wood]
Love all of that. Thank you.
[Nick Nader]
Of course.
[Lia Wood]
So one of the things that we should talk about is we all know that federal government moves a little bit slower than the commercial side. So there's, you know, there's definitely some barriers to that modernization, but modernization itself is not just technical, it's actually cultural. So what do you think the biggest challenges that the federal government is probably going through at the minute?
[Nick Nader]
Yeah. So, I mean, I'm the son of two lifelong federal employees. Change is very, let's say the federal agencies are change adverse, right?
They've got a lot of longstanding habits. They're familiar with their systems. Nobody likes to change that much.
So there's a lot of resistance to that change, which is why change enablement and user enablement is so important. You know, understanding kind of what their pain points are and what their complexities are today, and then pretty much smashing those complexities. And those pain points is pretty pertinent in getting users to adopt the actual configuration in the tool.
Right. Sure. So a lot of times that's, hey, Mr. end user, Mr. power user, Mr. or Mrs. power user. Like what are the biggest problems that you see with your current tool? We understand those problems. We create a solution for those problems.
And then we enable users to use a system that doesn't have those problems. Right. So we run into things like the security authorization processes being very stringent within the federal government and agencies.
So we try to streamline that authorization process as much as possible, you know, access process as much as possible. We try to make it as usable and user friendly as possible. Right.
The ease of use is extremely important. And when they see that ease of use early on and when we train them on that configuration, they very quickly get an understanding of that value. Right.
And that time to value within Jira Service Management and the Atlassian space tends to be very, very quick because there's all of these inherently built tools within Jira Service Management that make it intuitive to use, that make it very quick to submit requests as an example, that make it very easy to find information within your knowledge base. And you know, we'll talk about AI here in a second. But that is even taking that to the next step where, you know, it's anticipating things that end users are going to be asking and delivering the answers to those before they even get asked.
So even some kind of predictive AI aspects of that as well, which I think is our next segment.
[Lia Wood]
I was just going to say, that'll be the next segment. So let's talk about that. Let's look ahead.
What does the future look like, especially with the from an AI lens, because that seems to be the hot buzzword these days is what are what are we doing with AI in terms of software?
[Nick Nader]
Yeah. So the AI, AI, robo AI specifically is agentic AI. It has a lot of different applications across your environment.
Of course, there's going to be a lot of kind of like built in agents that the robo team at Atlassian have created that tend to be the most common asks from their their customers, especially in the commercial space, in the federal government space, it's probably going to be a little bit more purpose built once they get into the cloud, where you're creating your own custom agents. But what we're seeing is things like, obviously, summarization of content. So within confluence, within ticket resolution content, so hey, these are the most common incidents that we have coming in.
Let's have our agents for our agents analyze those determined root causes without, you know, human intervention or suggest root causes at least, and then have humans review them and approve those root causes, you know, make recommended or suggested responses to end users based off of that root cause analysis. So hey, we've seen these 10 incidents that are very similar to the one that you submitted. This is the way that we resolve them.
Here's the summary of that resolution, Mr. or Mrs. Reporter, try to take this resolution path yourself, you know, before our incident resolution team actually takes this to the next stage. So we're seeing a reduction in like agent workload because of that, because it's, you know, taking on some of those, you know, common requests itself, or it's being able to make suggestions that help the end users itself. And we're also seeing, obviously, like faster time to resolution when it does hit your help desk team, because on the internal side, we have agents that can be purpose built for helping that incident resolution process along its way by making recommendations for your agents that are resolving those incidents or improving time to implement a change because it's making recommendations to code changes over in your Bitbucket repository, as an example, all while kind of staying compliant from a security and data regulation perspective, because robo is, you know, fully embedded and built into, you know, those permissions that you have in the configurations and individual user visibility permissions for the different products and tools.
[Lia Wood]
Well, that's a lot, right? We've talked about a lot today where if somebody wanted to start their modernization journey, where do you think they should begin?
[Nick Nader]
Well, it all starts with understanding, like the process consulting aspect of things. Right. So for any engagement that Isos technology does, we always lead with discovery sessions that talk about that process.
Right. What is your current process? What are the pain points of that current process?
You know, where are your biggest challenges within your current tool set or processes? And then we start to kind of figure out and unpack all of those issues and build an ideal process for the entity organization. Right.
And that may be like mapping workflows across tools that may be figuring out where necessary integrations are, that may be just creating some of those, fixing some of those inefficiencies, the small inefficiencies that we keep talking about or understanding, you know, where the interdependencies between your departments are and how we can facilitate those dependencies and make them more streamlined with the automation engine or tying into other aspects within the Atlassian stack.
So what we do is we tend to partner with federal experts like Carahsoft and other contractors that help us understand kind of those intricacies and nuances of the different federal agencies that they've worked with for decades and decades and that we're now building out within our own practice space and how we do better discovery for federal agencies specifically because they do have very unique, let's say, intricacies of their own that we're definitely still unpacking.
So the modernization all starts with understanding, you know, what their problems are, where they're coming from, from their legacy tools, and then figuring out a path forward to like what that modern view of ITSM as an example looks like for them.
[Lia Wood]
Yeah. No, I love that. I think, you know, making sure that modernization is being is considered something that is more operational resilience.
It's not about just being coming modern to be modern. It's more making sure that you're actually doing something that has value for the entire organization. So operational resilience, making sure compliance visibility is also there so that it's not such a question mark of if you're actually compliant.
It should be easy enough to see.
[Nick Nader]
Should be auditable.
[Lia Wood]
Yeah, it should be auditable. Exactly. And then mission enablement.
Understanding, making sure people understand exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it and exactly how the tool is being used. So I know we've been over a lot today. You definitely educated us on everything.
So thank you so much for your time.
[Anthony Jimenez]
And I do.
[Lia Wood]
Yeah, of course. I do encourage all of the listeners to connect with Isos's Federal. This is where you can listen to more about modernization for ITSM in the federal government space.
[Anthony Jimenez]
Thank you so much.
[Lia Wood]
Thank you so much.
[Anthony Jimenez]
Thanks for listening. And thank you to our guests, Lia and Nick. Don't forget to like, comment and subscribe to Carahcast and be sure to listen to our other discussions.
If you'd like more information on how Atlassian and Isos's technology can assist your organization with ITSM modernization or workflow automation, please visit www.carahsoft.com/Atlassian or email us at Atlassian@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.