As a platform, ServiceNow continues to expand its functionalities and help enterprises scale and speed up their service delivery operations. As the Now Platform is used widely across business department, new integrations with third-party tools and platforms becomes necessary. ServiceNow’s latest Quebec release has introduced additional features to facilitate integration with other platforms, services, and tools. One such significant ServiceNow integration is with Atlassian's Jira.
As a software and project management tool for tracking bugs and issues, Atlassian's Jira has been widely adopted by development teams and its popularity continues to grow. Jira is adopted by agile teams for its out-of-box solutions that provides a centralized location for coding and collaboration and several project management, product management, software development, bug tracking, and task management features. Jira also supports integrations with other tools and platforms for increasing productivity and saving time. Jira and ServiceNow both have distinctive features because of which some businesses use both to manage their entire service life cycle as well as manage diverse teams. To understand the Jira and ServiceNow Integration more clearly, let's use a customer service management scenario.
When information is stored in silos, the communication between them tends to be manual, repetitive, and are prone to errors. Service tickets raised by customers need to be copied and pasted from ServiceNow to Jira which can be a tedious as well as an outdated process in the age of automation. Integration between ServiceNow and Jira can open bidirectional communication and automate the flow of information between the two applications in real-time eliminating dependence on manual transfer. This can help resolve tickets faster and more efficiently.
When the customer service team and development team, work in different environments and on disconnected or not adequately connected systems, it can lead to inordinate delays in resolving issues and quality issues leading to increased costs. With a ServiceNow and Jira integration, actions performed on one application can see a corresponding action on the other one almost simultaneously. If an issue is reported in ServiceNow, a ticket would automatically be created in Jira and all comments, attachments, and statuses would be shared across both applications in real-time allowing collaboration between multiple teams.
Asking all teams work on one particular tool may not be a good idea as the functionalities of an application may be limited. Teams tend to perform at their best when working in tools they are already familiar and comfortable with. Furthermore, with new tools, there is a learning curve and it would take time for a team to go through additional training. Integrating ServiceNow and Jira allows the customer service team and development team to work in the tools of their choice. For instance, the customer service team could work in ServiceNow and the development team continues using Jira, without facing the hassle of constantly updating the two systems. The bidirectional flow of information and automatic synchronization of records would ensure that both teams are updated in real-time leading to faster resolution of issues and enhanced customer experience.
With a ServiceNow and Jira integration, the visibility and traceability of processes and steps taken by both the customer service team and development team during the entire service life cycle are enhanced, from the moment a ticket is raised to the time it is resolved. This can help uncover factors contributing to delays and bottlenecks and assist in recalibrating processes to reduce the time to resolve and deliver solution by the development team. The insights gained from this can be used by businesses to make informed decisions for better customer satisfaction.
There are several ways to integrate ServiceNow with Jira, starting with ServiceNow’s own REST API which can be used to connect the two applications. Furthermore, there are a host of connectors available for integrating ServiceNow and Jira including Atlassian ServiceNow Connector for Jira, MuleSoft’s AnyPointTM ServiceNow Connector, and Atlassian JIRA REST Connector.