Access the podcast to hear digital transformation experts discuss how UConn adopted the Atlassian cloud platform to modernize IT infrastructure, scale service delivery and centralize institutional assets. Learn how your organization can optimize learning and administrative environments with Atlassian's secure cloud services, powered by Jira Service Management, Confluence and Assets.
[Anthony Jimenez]
Welcome back to Carahcast, the podcast from Carahsoft, a 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 and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast, focused on reimagining task management and collaboration in higher education through UConn's digital transformation journey. Joining us today are Elisa Aviles-Bodoin, lead solutions engineer for SLG at Atlassian, and Will Harris, Atlassian application administrator at the University of Connecticut. Together they'll discuss how UConn unified service delivery, empowered collaboration across departments, and improved student and staff experiences through the Atlassian cloud platform.
[Elisa Aviles-Bodoin]
Welcome everyone. My name is Elisa Aviles-Bodoin, I am your lead solutions engineer for state and local government at Atlassian. And I want to welcome everyone to a very special episode of our podcast, one that's close to my heart, and I hope will inspire you as much as it inspires me today.
Today we're not just talking about technology or processes. We're talking about the future of our country, the power of education, and the incredible potential that lives in every student, in every classroom, and in every community. When I think about the environment that we're building for the next generation, I think about the basics sometimes.
And it's as simple as making sure that every child at Playgroup has a crayon. But it's also about asking, who do we turn to for the big ask, when we need help? Who steps up to ensure that the students and our educators and our institutions have what they need to thrive?
And that's what really brings us here today. The education sector holds a really special place in my heart. Now my father spent his career working at an Ivy League university, and my mother worked for the New Jersey Department of Transportation.
Both are retired now. Now that really provided me with a deeper sense of appreciation for those fields. And if I can be vulnerable, I can admit that school wasn't always easy for me.
Lifed pretty hard for me in my early 20s. And there were times I considered giving up, but I persevered, transferring and getting my associates, my bachelor's, and eventually my master's in business, all while working full time. Education became my foundation and my springboard, shaping who I am today and fueling my commitment for supporting the education sector and state and local government agencies.
So I'm honored to celebrate the amazing new intake process here at the University of Connecticut, a university that not only shapes students, but also shapes the future of our country. And for me, this is personal. I've had the privilege of partnering with the UConn for the past five years.
And during that time, I partner with Will Harris during UConn's digital transformation. And we've seen it all trials, tribulations, and even triumphs. So today we're going to talk about a journey.
But I challenge you to also think about your journey, what you needed, who helped you and what worked well for you and who you work together to get the tools that you needed. And the next generation, what they'll need from their support and the inspiration that will drive them to succeed. Because when we invest in education, when we collaborate across borders, and when we never give up on each other, we unlock the best potential in our country and in ourselves.
So let's get started. And I have a very special guest with me here today that I'd love to introduce you to, Will Harris.
[Will Harris]
My name is Will Harris, and I'm an Atlassian Application Administrator here at UConn. I started 10 years ago as a student worker. And as a student, I became very familiar with our ticketing system and the ins and outs of routing tickets around a large IT organization.
When it came time for us to move to a new system, and we landed on the Atlassian suite, I became very involved in the design and implementation of the product, eventually resulting in me accepting a full-time position here when I graduated. During this time, I grew to understand how important technology is in the higher education space. In the past, technology was a supplement to learning, but today it's really a fundamental part of education.
From critical systems that support course management and grading in the background, all the way to the laptop sitting in front of the student, technology is integrated in the entire part of the process. IT systems stability and support is critical to universities' ultimate goal of ensuring the best outcomes for every student. In order to do that, we need to connect the university community to our IT staff with the least amount of friction possible, both for our users reporting issues and for our IT staff members supporting them.
This brings me to my role now as a Work Management System Administrator and our journey with Atlassian Tools. This started with a data center implementation of JSM, Confluence, and JIRA back in 2019, where we worked for a few years developing our projects and processes and creating the foundation for the system we have today. In early 2021, we decided to move our suite of Atlassian Tools into the cloud, and by January 2022, we completed our migration.
Once we were in the cloud, we really began to grow rapidly. Since migration to the cloud, we've more than doubled our number of licensed users and added more than 20 new JSM projects to the site. These tools grew from being exclusively used by central IT to being used by all major IT groups at the university, and now we offer these tools to the university community at large, supporting all types of business functions for a wide variety of students, really, end of the day, looking to the best outcomes for our students.
[Elisa Aviles-Bodoin]
You know, Will, we've been talking about your journey at UConn, and I keep coming back to the idea of intake, not just as a process, but as a front door to so many experiences for students, faculty, and staff. It's where the needs first surface, where problems get noticed, and where the rest of the work of supporting a university community really begins. I've seen firsthand how much thought and care you and your team have put into making this first point of contact as smooth and as effective as possible, but I also know that behind every seamless intake process, there's lots of iteration, collaboration, and sometimes even a bit of trial and error.
So for everyone listening today who might be wondering how a large university actually manages all those requests and keeps things running, I'd love to dig into the nuts and the bolts just a little bit. So Will, we mentioned intake in your intro. Talk to me about how do you ensure that your intake system via Juris Service Management effectively tracks, manages services for the entire University of Connecticut community?
[Will Harris]
So yeah, it's been an iterative process to make sure we're appropriately tracking the wide range of services that we provide to the university community. When first moving to Jura, we looked back at several years of ticket data from our previous issue tracking system and identified the most common issues our end users faced. Really this served as our initial customer request types and gave us a good starting point, but obviously it was impossible to capture every potential category.
Once we were fully migrated to Jura, the real work began. We worked closely with all of the teams inside of ITS to identify gaps in our support structure and address them. You know, usually this looks like it's starting with a team reaching out regarding a pain point with a specific type of service request.
It might be that common requests are submitted missing information, or they have a web form that currently sends to a shared mailbox rather than directly into Jura. From there, we identified the lowest friction way to get that ticket created and routed. If customers are used to using that web form and communicating directly with IT staff via email, just changing the form submission to route into Jura is already a win and causes the least disruption possible to the customer experience.
And now that we've got that form coming right into Jura, we can automate it to the correct team, tag it with a label for long-term tracking, and even prompt users to provide information without needing a technician to touch the ticket. By iterating on our services and always being willing to work with teams on new forms and automations, we've gone from being a relatively lean Jura instance to one now covering a huge range of services to meet our customers' and technicians' needs. If we'd held off moving into Jura until we represented every service with its own form, we'd probably still be working on our migration five years later.
[Elisa Aviles-Bodoin]
You know, Will, as you were describing how you and the classroom support team tackled those challenges, it really brought up my own college days and my own experience. I remember this one time, picture a packed lecture hall, not much like what we're in today, and everyone's waiting for the class to start. And suddenly the projector just refuses to cooperate.
There's this collective groan of all of the students, and you can just feel the tension that was rising and kind of bubbling. And every minute counted. Back then, we didn't have this kind of seamless tech support that we're talking about today.
Sometimes the professor would just have to give up or just start drawing diagrams on the board, or we'd all have to scramble around a crowd of us around their laptop and just kind of look at their screen. It was a little chaotic. But it also made me appreciate just how much goes into behind the scenes to keep things really up and running smoothly.
I'm also dating myself a little bit, so I need to watch out for that. So in the past, you've talked about this linking confluence spaces directly into classroom assets. I know we've worked together for so long, and that's something that really stuck out with me, and how those empowered your support teams to really respond faster and more effectively.
And that makes me realize just how far you've really come, especially in this process. And it's not just about firing up a projector, right, or rebooting a computer. It's about making sure the learning experience doesn't skip a beat, and that everyone in the room will feel supported, and even it feels like they're being collaborated with.
That brings me to something I'm really curious about. You mentioned iteration, which instantly made me think of communication and collaboration. What improvements have you seen since linking confluence spaces to classroom assets, and were there any unexpected challenges or pains that you've had to solve along the way?
[Will Harris]
Yeah, so this is a really great example of a pain, starting with a pain point our technicians were facing, and giving them the tools to speed up service without the customer even being aware of what's going on behind the scenes. So our classroom support team has always been very customer-focused. With technology in a classroom setting, you need to solve issues quickly.
15 minutes of a projector being down during a class will affect instruction, and an hour of downtime could make it impossible for a class to proceed as planned. The classroom support team developed a number of remote tools to assist instructors as fast as possible without always needing to dispatch a technician 20 minutes across campus. With direct access to classroom equipment like PCs, touch panels, power controllers, and more, our team can solve a huge number of issues from their desk.
The problem was that these tools were not fully organized, and just identifying and locating the right tool to use was a skill of its own, and required more training to get IT staff up to speed and confident they could use these tools to support when resolution time is critical. To solve this, the classroom support team and I worked together to create a confluence space where each classroom had its own page. On each page, there are all the tools and information you need to support specific rooms, and with one click, you could be controlling classroom computers, you could be using pictures of equipment in the room to help guide the instructor to the right power button, where the lav microphone charger is, or really any other equipment in the room.
If assets in the room needed attention, you could open assets for the room right from the confluence page and view past maintenance history, warranty information, JIRA tickets associated with the equipment, all in one place. Really this supercharged an already fantastic support team, and critically made training new staff much easier and much more effective.
[Elisa Aviles-Bodoin]
Oh man, thanks for sharing. You know, you mentioned this 15-minute rule. I instantly brought me back to my college days.
There was always this unspoken agreement among students, if a professor or TA didn't show up after 15 minutes, we'd just quietly go up to the board, sign our names on that board, and make a beeline for the door. No questions asked. Did you have a similar experience?
[Will Harris]
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I've been there for the 15-minute rule before. I don't know if that's actually a rule, though.
[Elisa Aviles-Bodoin]
I don't know. I feel like it's an unspoken college rule, though. But thinking about it now, it's funny how those little traditions kind of stick with us, even as the world around us kind of changes so much.
Back then, the biggest tech issues were whether or not the chalk would break, or whether or not the professor could get a projector to work, or if the projector even overheated. But today, the stakes are a little much higher, and you mentioned that. Technology is woven into every part of the classroom experience, and a few minutes of downtime can really impact everyone and throw off an entire lesson.
It makes me appreciate just how much goes into behind the scenes, and how important it is to have the right structure in place. So let's bring it back to today's reality, and let's come out of my time machine. Let's talk a little bit about structure.
I'm curious, how does having separate IT departments for each college impact your overall IT strategy? Great question, huh?
[Will Harris]
Yeah, definitely. So UConn, like many other large universities, has a central IT unit, as well as smaller IT units that support colleges directly. Think of IT directly for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, IT for the Engineering Department, IT for the School of Business, things like that.
So while ITS, the main organization, may handle larger systems for these colleges, the distributed IT staff really serves as direct contacts for faculty and staff in these areas. And fostering collaboration between all of the IT groups at UConn has been a huge part of my career so far. These IT groups have different customer bases, access levels, and support different services, but have a lot of overlap when it comes to skill set and general IT support.
So when I started as a JIRA admin, every single team had their own issue tracking solution. None of these were interconnected, and routing support to another IT team at the university was sometimes a matter of telling the customer to hang up the phone and call a different number. That's definitely not the best end user experience, and it created silos for IT support at the university.
Fast forward to today, and every single IT unit at the university is together on one JIRA instance. Everyone has visibility into the other unit's projects and can freely create, move, and link issues where needed. This wasn't achieved overnight, and it was the result of six years of consistent and conscious collaboration.
It's hard to convince a team to give up control of the solution they've been using for years and move over to one that's centrally managed by an admin that reports to a completely different unit. We really worked on this by closely collaborating with leadership for these distributed IT units, openly showing how we were using JIRA and its strengths and weaknesses. When units expressed interest in coming to JIRA, we worked with them directly rather than prescribing a solution and forcing them onto it.
Rather than being admins to force you to do things their way, we tried to be partners in the endeavor. We were there to provide technical knowledge on JIRA from our own experience, but never to force you to do things our way. With this process, we were able to bring our first distributed IT team on board with great success, and it quickly spread to other units.
We brought a new IT unit in every year with the last team moving over to JIRA in 2024. Now we can route issues between us and collaborate to provide the most effective service for our end users. And really importantly, no one is asking them to hang up and call a different number anymore.
[Elisa Aviles-Bodoin]
Awesome. I really love that insight. Listening to how you describe the journey of siloed IT teams to a truly unified support system at UConn, I couldn't help but think about how changes really happen in big institutions.
It's really about a single top-down mandate. It's more like those moments by the water cooler when someone shares a tip of success story and then suddenly everyone wants to try and get in on it themselves. I've seen it so many times, right, where our customers, they have these great ideas and they just don't stay in one department, and we don't want them to.
They ripple out, sparking curiosity and inspiring others to really jump in. It reminds me of when I started working with another university. There was always that one team who'd take a new tool and run with it.
And before you know it, their colleagues down the hall would say, hey, what are you doing with that? Or I'd love to understand that more. Can you educate us on what you're doing?
And that kind of organic growth is so powerful because it's built on trust and real results, not just process. So speaking of grassroots innovation, could you share an example of a successful project that was managed by one of your college IT departments? I'd love to hear how those efforts have played out in practice and what kind of impact they've had across the entire university.
[Will Harris]
Yeah, so our colleagues over at the College of Liberal Arts and Science have really been amazing partners in adopting Atlassian tools and spreading their usage outside of just IT. So CLAS IT was the first IT unit to move into our suite, and they took off running. A large amount of their IT project administration has been delegated out to them, and now we're able to be pretty hands-off, only getting involved when site admins' permissions are needed to make a change or they need our expertise for some reason.
They've extended functionality in their own ways, becoming experts at automation, and they've actively helped us test new site-wide features as they roll out. On top of their own success, they've also helped administrative staff within CLAS start using Atlassian tools for a whole host of business use cases that may previously have been tracked exclusively through email. They've spun up projects for their dean's office to track tasks, their business office to process purchases and reimbursements, and even long-term project and initiative tracking across the unit in order to provide visibility into these initiatives for leadership.
Using team-managed projects, I've been able to almost entirely hand off administration of these projects to CLAS IT, who work with their users to set up new workflows, automations, and project configurations to support more and more use cases every day. And this really stemmed from ITS starting out as partners with CLAS IT rather than rigid administrators. They've been empowered to become JIRA experts themselves and apply these tools to improve services beyond just IT.
[Anthony Jimenez]
Thanks for listening, and thank you to our guests, Elisa Aviles-Bodoin and Will Harris, for sharing their insights. 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 Carahsoft can assist your organization's streamlined collaboration and service management, please visit www.Carahsoft.com/Atlassian or email us at atlassian@Carahsoft.com. Thanks again for tuning in and have a great day.