by Bill Cushard, (@BillCush)

When Atlassian launched Jira Service Desk in late 2013, you were excited to take what you were already doing in Jira to manage your help desk, put an easy-to-use front-end interface, and run an actual service desk on Jira. No more Zendesk or ServiceNow. No more Issue Collector and, most importantly, no more email box named ITHelp@yourcompany.com. You could finally simplify your help desk tracking system with the issue tracker (Jira) you already use, and you could automate ticket triaging and SLA reporting. And now that you have a few months under your belt, you are starting to think about how other parts of your business can use Jira Service Desk to improve how it provide services and support to people in your organization.

This is where Jira Service Desk really gets interesting.

Think of all of the email boxes that exist in your organization that employees use to get service from other departments. Departments like payroll, facilities, purchasing, HR are all using email boxes right. You know what they are:

• payroll@yourcompany.com
• facilities@yourcompany.com
• purchasing@yourcompany.com
• hr@yourcompany.com

Setting up these email address seemed like a good idea at the time. After all:

• Everyone already uses email, so it will be easy for people to use it
• Email addressed are inexpensive to set up
• Multiple people can monitor the inbox, so no messages go unseen

Well, you know what happened next. Inboxes became a nightmare to manage. The very day John from facilities went on vacation is the day the pipes in the women's bathroom in building 2 broke and a slow leak began to reach the break room before someone saw the 12 emails in the facilities@yourcompany.com inbox. And what about the time both Terry and Joe saw the urgent purchasing request from the VP of Sales but did not respond because each thought the other was responding to it. By the way, how to do report Service Level Agreements (SLA) out of an email inbox anyway?

I could go on, but you get the point.

The solution to all of these problems is Jira Service Desk. I know what you are thinking. Atlassian products are for software developers and other IT departments, not for HR or Marketing. It may have started that way, but Jira Service Desk is quickly becoming a vital tool for providing better services and support to internal customers of any kind in your organization.

If you use Jira Service Desk for departments other than for your IT Help Desk, we'd love to hear about that. In the comments below, share how you are using Jira Service Desk.

And if you want to learn more about Jira Service Desk and what it can do, join one of our Jira Service Desk Jam Sessions. Jam Sessions are a way to see how a tool works and for you to ask questions about your particular needs. A knowledgable Jira professional will show you the product and answer your questions.