Jira Service Management is sadly still not a real ITSM

Well, in quite a few areas, Jira Service Management/Assets still feels surprisingly immature.

For classic ITSM in particular, you would really expect the following to be standard:

• Ticket ↔ Asset as a native relationship
• Multiple relationship types such as “affects”, “procured because of”, “replaces”, “incident on”, “change for”
• Visible from both sides
• Without first having to establish a dedicated Assets custom field on the ticket screens

The fact that Jira Assets essentially models this connection through an Assets field on the work item is functional, but conceptually rather cumbersome. Especially in the case: a procurement/service ticket exists once, while the asset continues to exist for years afterwards. That is almost a textbook example of a relationship.

JSM can do a lot by now, but in areas like this one can still clearly see that Jira was originally an issue tracker and that ITSM/CMDB functionality was added around it later. Systems that historically originated in ITSM/CMDB usually model these kinds of relationships much more naturally.