Have you ever submitted an online request and waited and waited for a response? Have you ever had trouble adjusting to constituent demand?
“Organizations need to respond with speed to changing circumstances,” said Phill Fox, Principal Customer Success Advocate with Adaptivist, an Atlassian solutions provider that specializes in transformation. “If you have a traditional service management approach, how flexible, how responsive is [it]? Can you scale it up quickly because you suddenly have a demand?” In recent years, agencies have been using service management tools across all departments, Fox said, removing the artificial barriers between internal and external systems and helping agencies better serve the public and other users. There are a few key rules for success.
Be Nimble and Quick
Using cloud solutions, organizations can automatically scale up their systems when constituent demand is high and down when demand is lighter. This enables agencies to be more responsive, efficient and constituent-friendly.
Most federal agencies are going through a major digital modernization effort, replacing outdated/ legacy systems with cloud-based solutions, said Sandra Trumbull, Enterprise Solutions Advocate with Atlassian, a software-based company.
And self-service — whether through guided prompts, artificial intelligence or other methods — is increasingly important because users are more empowered and typically obtain faster responses, service teams have fewer headaches, agencies can lower their service costs, and everyone receives a better overall experience.
Don’t Wait for “Perfect”
Organizations shouldn’t spend all their time designing an exciting new service management system that they never get around to building.
“There’s a suitable amount of upfront work to do to get things right, but you’ll never be perfect,” Fox explained. “So, start with what you do know and what you can define, build that, listen to the feedback, react to that feedback, and improve and expand and grow out.”
Why do many IT transformation projects fail? “It’s often because they spend all their time designing up front…and by the time they get around to building, the world has already moved on,” he said.
How Atlassian Helps
Atlassian’s Enterprise Solution suite consists of several powerful, easy-to-deploy tools. Confluence is a remote-friendly team workspace to share information and collaborate on projects. Jira Service Management, built on the Jira software platform, helps agencies with end-to-end delivery of IT and enterprise services to employees and constituents.
Essentially, it helps users easily initiate, receive, track, manage and resolve service requests from any location on virtually any device, via web browser or email, or from within an embeddable widget in other apps (e.g., Teams, Slack and more) any time.
The example of an Atlassian-built nature park website shows how smooth this process can be. Using service management solutions, the customizable site takes constituents on a streamlined journey and establishes open communication between individuals and agency staff responding to their needs.
And because user requests generally fall into common categories, the Atlassian site can anticipate many responses to people’s queries — and leave constituents feeling good about their timely, effective agency interactions.
This article appears in our Guide, “Unpacking Digital Transformation.” Read more about how agencies are getting the most out of their modernization and transformation efforts, download the guide.
