Email Communication Is A Horrible ITSM Integration Strategy

[Syed Majid Hassan -Exalate-]

Around 48% of companies pair Jira with a dedicated ITSM platform. We picked their brains to find out the challenges, hidden costs, and potential solutions to make real-time ITSM integration a reality.

Welcome to Sync Room: Episode 2

This is a follow-up post that comes from our “Sync Room by Exalate” webinar series.

In this episode, my co-host, Manoosh, and I discussed different ITSM integration scenarios, what breaks them, and how to choose a winning strategy.

Let's dive right in.

The Broken ITSM Elephant in The Room

Imagine a SaaS company with global teams working on specialized areas. The support team is handling customer concerns in Jira Service Management, while the devs are working on the task using Jira Software. 

And this is a common issue in most companies.

Our recent survey shows that 48% of respondents preferred pairing Jira with a dedicated ITSM platform (ServiceNow, Zendesk, Freshservice, or Freshdesk). 

These numbers show that over half of the surveyed companies using Jira for ITSM still rely on email and Slack updates to keep up with service delivery. 

Without addressing this ITSM-shaped elephant, your company would be setting itself up for inefficient workflows, disconnected systems, data siloes, and dissatisfied customers.

A Tale of Two Broken ITSM Workflows

Scenario 1 

Support uses Jira Service Management (JSM) while the developers use Jira Software. They only share updates via email threads: 

1. A customer files a complaint to support as a JSM ticket. 
2. The team lead creates an email thread with a quick summary for the dev lead.
3. The ticket is then created manually on the Jira Software side based on this information. 

Result: Infinite email chains with updates and missing context going back and forth between team members who are getting increasingly frustrated at one another.

Scenario 2

Same scenario, but instead of relying on email communication, the tasks, tickets, and work items are created manually by an admin. Updates also flow back and forth manually with admin approval. 

1. The JSM ticket data is copied and shared with the devs to create a work item manually. 
2. The devs now drop comments and updates for the support team to break down to the customer. 

Result: Unnecessary delays and broken communication chains at each level, which often lead to dissatisfied customers and disjointed ITSM workflows.

Why Email is Not Your Savior

From what I’ve seen in the field, email is still king in some organizations. Some companies even rely on systems like Slack and Teams for the integration of ITSM systems.

But these options are far from ideal for a coherent ITSM strategy because of the following reasons:

• Longer resolution timelines for customer concerns
• Ever-growing backlog of tickets on the support desk 
• Missing attachments and context for tickets and work items
• Overall terrible customer experience, which often leads to churn
• Formation of information silos between support staff and developers
• Precious work hours spent on manually replicating the issue in the dev system.

Integration As Your Salvation: A Strategy That Works

Native integrations are great for simple escalation logic: the ticket goes from P1 to P2 automatically with all the needed context.  

But once you try to add any extra layer of complexity, native integrations will no longer fit your needs. 

That’s where a tool like Exalate can help you address the elephant in the ITSM room, so you can help support engineers and developers march in lockstep. 

Alright, enough puns for today.

But trust me, we’ve implemented this particular workflow in-house at Exalate (as well as for enterprises and MSPs) to help resolve issues faster and build institutional knowledge. 

The implementations have been remarkable so far:

• Real-time escalation based on priority and category.
• Automatic work item creation in Jira and Azure DevOps 
• Better visibility and context from description, attachments, metadata, and source info.
• Bi-directional integration to convey status changes, resolution information, and comments (internal notes). 
• Granular security controls and field-level autonomy over the data for sync.

• Complete audit trail for compliance.

Should You Build or Buy The Integration?

We all know this: any decent engineering team can build a simple integration in a few weeks. And with AI and other tools out there, they can easily knock down the time to mere days. 

But that’s good and fine until you now have to deal with edge cases, security and authentication, multi-platform support, and ongoing maintenance. The headaches start to pile up. You can calculate the base cost yourself.

Buying the off-the-shelf option will shave off days, even weeks. Just pay for the integration solution, and you can get through the setup and configuration in a few hours. The ancillary stuff will be handled for you.

A very common sentiment: “Focus on your business and outsource integration to the specialists.” 

If you're running Jira Software/Service Management and dealing with support escalations:

1. Map Jira statuses to each team’s workflow.
2. Keep each team in their specialized environment.
3. Buy integration solutions to explore more synchronization possibilities.
4. Establish a common knowledge base between support and development teams.
5. Automate based on business rules (priority fields, categories, assignment groups).

Join Us for Episode 3

We’ll be back with the next episode in January, after the holidays.

If you've got interesting use cases or specific questions about ITSM integration, I’d gladly discuss them in the comments, or you can reach out directly to us.