On jira, itil and service desk patterns

I've had occasion this week to be revisiting a pattern that I've discussed on regular occasions with consulting colleagues, clients and other Atlassian Experts - whether to use JIRA as a product for a Service Desk pattern and the extent to which it helps an organisation with ITIL conformance. Whilst JIRA as a task and issues management system is tremendously flexible, working to make it an ITIL aligned service desk tool takes quite a bit of work and can't be done on some platforms readily or easily, depending on the depth of ITIL alignment you're chasing.  The extent to which you need to use 3rd party plugins means it is only viable in OnPremise/Dedicated Hosting (i.e. don't try and do this in OnDemand, which is a controlled instance that constrains your plugin choices).

To help understand what the differences might be between using JIRA as a basic service desk tool for issue logging and workflow handling vs comprehensive ITIL coverage, we've collected a range of links for ease of reference, covering current state of play regarding ITIL support by Atlassian as well as some supplementary products that help bridge the gap. If you've got some extra posts that you'd like to recommend us to include, just drop us a comment below.

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Jira and ITIL - recommended reads

Atlassians position on Support for ITIL Processes: see JRA-4700 

Atlassian Answers: Jira and ITILv3

Atlassian Knowledgebase: Using Jira for Helpdesk or Support 

Atlassian Blog: How Atlassian uses JIRA for Support

Martins Kemme - Using JIRA to support ITIL processes

Martins Kemme: SLA management for JIRA

Gap Fillers

SLAdiator: for SLA reporting, monitoring

VertygoSLA plugin for JIRA by Valiantsys

Atlassian Labs: IT Service Desk Workflow Plugin

We'll be posting more on this topic shortly - for now, regard it as a curated post of recommended links on the subject to help you in your own deliberations about how far to be chasing ITIL alignment with your JIRA platform. Clients already using Jira often like to leverage its flexibility to provide partial coverage of their ITIL needs, squeezing extra value from their platforms. But lets remember, its not a dedicated ITIL platform, though it can be tuned to provide some pretty good coverage of key elements.