In this podcast, Mike Downard, President of Silicon Mountain, and Kevin Howard, Sales Manager at Carahsoft, discuss how nontechnical teams are embracing digital practices like enterprise service management (ESM) solutions through Atlassian's Jira Service Management tool to enhance daily workflow.
Kevin Howard
All right, welcome back to CarahCast the podcast from Carahsoft, the trusted government IT solutions provider. Subscribe to get the latest technology updates in the public sector. I'm Kevin Howard, your host from the Atlassian team at Carahsoft. And on behalf of Atlassian and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused on enterprise service management. Mike Downard is the President of Silicon Mountain Technologies will share his expertise on the subject. Silicon Mountain is a management consulting firm based in Lakewood, Colorado, and has helped their clients explore problems, create solutions, and disrupt the status quo for nearly two decades using Atlassian products. Mike joined Silicon Mountain in 2015, as a senior project manager before becoming director of operations in 2017. And then President 2021 Mike, thank you for taking some time out of your day. It's been a while excited to talk to you about Atlassian's Jira Service Management.
Mike Downard
Good morning. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
Kevin Howard
No problem at all. So, to jump right in, I know IT Service Management or ITSM refers to the processes and activities involved in end-to-end delivery of IT services. And with governments, IT teams constant exposure to new and old technology, innovation tends to develop organically. Today we're going to be talking about enterprise service management, an innovative approach that applies ITSM methodologies to non-technical workflows, like HR teams, procurement teams, legal and more. Mike, first question, it would be what is Silicon Mountain's approach to ITSM? What are some of those components? Do you think that are relevant to non-technical teams? And what benefits? Do you think ITSM could deliver?
Mike Downard
Sure, a three-part question. So, it's fun. So, let's start with our approach is generally, that we do a quick escalation process, right? Give as much information and authority to the frontline line folks as we can. But we want to make sure that we get the information and the questions to the people that need or have the capability to solve those problems as quickly as possible. We subscribe more to if people are familiar with ITIL, the V4 more than the v3. It's more flexible. It's more foundational that here's some methodologies, or here's some processes you can use. Rather than prescriptive, which I feel like v3 was more prescriptive in that process. We also want to make sure that we take some of this information, you know, IT folks or IT service folks tend to be at the bottom of the food chain and take some pretty hard swings, from folks in the knowledge work or people who need their services. We think that because of that experience, the program and the systems around it have grown and developed and matured in a specific way that makes that process a lot more easy to adopt within other parts of the organization, your back office, within the rest of your enterprise, we can take some of those lessons learned about, hey, let's build workflows. Let's not make it too hard for our people, let's make sure that we have efficient and effective workflows in the process. And that we then can kind of have all this information in one place so that we can pull it up so that senior leaders can see how things are performing, you know, augment staff as necessary and anything like that.
Kevin Howard
Awesome. Thank you for that, Mike. I think it was very helpful explaining kind of the escalation process, how it is valuable to multiple teams or streamlining the workflow for the entire environment, moving into kind of prior implementing or adapting one of those enterprise service management solutions, how to how would you say government teams collaborate prior to implementing this? What would work? What doesn't work? And how are legacy tools and methods holding agencies back?
Mike Downard
It's a great question. There's, there's an entire generation of folks that grew up on email, a lot of folks that have gray hairs at this point. You know, silver foxes, if you will, they're all you know, very familiar with interchanging their information through email, they build their PDFs, they build their information, and their workflows and their processes on paper, or an Excel or maybe even an access if they had are pretty fancy. The problem with that is there's not a lot of transparency or scalability in those solutions. So, as you try to service, something at the scale of the government, those tools are available to them. But it doesn't scale very well. You end up having a lot of starts and stops bottlenecks issues that arise there's not a ton of transparency to leadership and how things are performing, getting data out of those systems is unreliable. And sometimes versioning of historical data can be a challenge. So what we hope to do is bring in some new systems, some new approaches to that like Atlassian, Jira Service Management Tools, a great example of, hey, we can, we can have a few agents that are servicing this process, which is very similar to, you know, what your DAG, your CAG, your PA teams are doing in the government. But you're pulling all this information across a system that people are familiar with. Hopefully, we at our team tried to make this as easy as possible by giving people more of giving them the fish rather than teaching them to fish on building out the system. Because we want to make it as simple as possible to just manage the workflow that works for them. value that is it makes it consistent. It adds a layer of transparency, now you can actually see where things start and stop. You can see when things fall behind, and you can actually do something about it. I don't always think of the accountability or transparency as a problem. I think it's an opportunity for leaders to step in, remove some barriers or add some resources as necessary.
Kevin Howard
Awesome points there, Mike, thank you for that, kind of exploring alternative solutions to email and more collaboration, tools that can help teams grow, I wanted to dive into a little bit more about SMT Silicon Mountain's motto is explore, create and disrupt. So, for that three-step process is core to what we're talking about today. Atlassian is enterprise management platform Jira Service Management, which was developed by exploring bottlenecks caused by poor communication, department silos, lack of visibility and workflow inefficiencies. With some of those pain points in mind. Atlassian created a solution that disrupted the status quo with a collaborative, consistent, transparent, and automated set of services. With that said, what is the first step teams are looking to embrace a new enterprise service management software like Jira Service Management? Where would they get started? What are some of the things that they need in line to go to upper management to propose this?
Mike Downard
So, I think there's a couple of things to that, right. So, there's a professor out of Georgetown, named Cal Newport, he writes a bunch of theory around deep work and life without email. And I think his books are a great example of, hey, we've, we built email as an internal almost mistake. We built it as a communication method between systems that became a communication method between companies, over time, we've kind of really over leveraged that tool in a way that it's not really intended to be built, it was it was almost a server-to-server sort of conversation for notes. And now it's a business solution system. I think the first step, and it's the same in any sort of change of this sort of scale, is you have to make sure that you have the right environment for change, and you have the right leadership and teams for change. You don't need everybody on board, but you need to have at least a small coalition of folks and a strong leader who are willing to pull in a different direction than the traditional or the legacy email solution, or Excel solution that they might be using today. And you have to be willing to look at this and say, What are the benefits that I can actually gain from this, I can actually tell my boss, hey, I'm busy every day, but they don't believe me, well, now I can actually show them with metrics with numbers with data, how hard my job might be, or how hard my team's job might be, or how we're under resourced and, and setting expectations for external customers that, hey, we're three weeks behind is a lot easier when you can actually show them the work or show them that your cadence, your velocity, for lack of a better term in what you're doing, I think the best place because we're talking about enterprise service, a lot of these people have very difficult jobs. They're in administrative or back-office roles. They're overwhelmed by just the sheer volume of work that can come in from anything from processing, systems access or forms, security forms, benefits, you know, any variety of systems that might exist. Where we want to start with them is engaging as a professional services company, because what Atlassian has built here is the framework and the very flexible solution to the problem. But asking somebody who's a novice in the tool to go in and just configure it on their own based off the workflow that they might have, I think is a little unfair, because that's a lot for them to chew off. They don't they are unfamiliar with the system. They're unfamiliar with digitizing a workflow. They're unfamiliar with building out new fields and what that means and potential like architectural issues that they could run into. So we would really encourage that aim to do is engage somebody who really understands the capability and the potential of these tools to not show them a blank page, but rather show them what's in the realm of possibility, starting by exploring what the current process is, adding steps, removing steps to make it as effective as possible. And then making it consistent, transparent, and making sure that folks have the ability to see where their status is, and not over burdening the cost of things. So, let's build this for the people who actually are going to use it back to those gray hair, folks, some of them were not going to convert. So, let's not assume that, you know, in 06 and 07, and SES or is going to jump into the system and manage all of their approvals. Let's make sure that we build those steps around what's realistic to be implemented within their environment.
Kevin Howard
Awesome. Thank you, Mike. I think those are some great first steps. And you kind of narrowed it down to a three-prong approach of the people the process and the system. When looking at that, or when looking at somebody new that's exploring an ESM solution. What would you say on the opposite side? What are some of those common objections against transitioning from the legacy workflows to a new platform?
Mike Downard
I have a great anecdote for this actually, we work in the historically in the medical device industry. And there's something called a sterile processing center and, in every hospital, and we walked in and as part of our discovery are part of our explore process, we talked to this expert in restocking their trauma kits and restocking their, whatever medical device kits that they might have. And he had five, six, you know, catalogs of equipment from various vendors. And he had his pencil out, and he was sharpen it. And he knew exactly where everything went, and exactly what page to go find things. Well, if it's not obvious, that's not a very scalable solution. That's not a transitional solution. That's not even likely a trainable solution. That's a that's a course of 10 to 15 years of experience. So, what we want to do is build a more consistent workflow and automate some of that and build in a digital component to that, where you really don't need an expert, you don't need somebody to have worked this job for 10 years in order to do it. But that we can build for them a solution that starts with very straightforward steps as a request that looks pretty for everybody, and works through from a people standpoint, first, what's the most important thing who's involved, how we get there, and then build the processes around those people, and then get to the system implementation from there.
Kevin Howard
Okay, understood. I think those are some great ways to overcome some of those objections. Going into my next point, let's talk a little bit about how ESM would be best used in an agency, when would the agency choose to opt for ESM? And when would you not?
Mike Downard
So, I think if you already have a solution within the tools that you use, I think that's okay. Right, I don't think you necessarily need to leverage this as long as you can get the data out. If I were a senior leader within the government, and I'm a senior leader within private industry, so it's I need to be able to consume and understand how my teams are performing at any given point. For me to do that, I need to have the ability to consolidate the data and ability to track and trust the data. Otherwise, it's, you know, garbage in, garbage out, or there's just no way to actually extract that information. So from an end user perspective, or an administrator and a back office employee, who's doing all this great work, the value is you don't get annoyed by your senior leader who's pushing you for all this information that says, hey, I don't really see how you're that busy or gives you gives you flak at any given point, or maybe they just don't understand the value of the work that you do, or how, how hard and how long it might actually take. Well, by adding a couple of steps in this is adding a couple of steps. In some cases, you're actually removing a lot of barriers to that level of success to that transparency to that ability for you to self-advocate that you can't really get out of email that you can't really get out of Excel. So, if you already have that solution and a tool great, and you can extract that and you can combine that with other tools, great. In most cases, that doesn't exist. Because the tool or the product that was built wasn't really built for the workflow part portion of it. It was built for a very specific execution point of a tool, or maybe it was just built for enrolling people in benefits, and it doesn't really have a communication or a status that's tied to that. It just does a thing. Well, building in a workflow to that gives everybody a concept and a measurable point of how things are performing. You can start to prioritize work and you can start tracking and apparently showing people exactly what is happening within your organization without going through a ton of effort to then rebuild all this information or build it from scratch and PowerPoint present. How far behind you think you are, you actually have that data available to you.
Kevin Howard
Interesting, I think those are some valid points to kind of piggyback on that when you're exploring these with potential clients or current customers that you're working with. Can you speak to kind of some of the short term or long-term impacts of implementing a software like Jira Service Management? For ESM? What is some of the value upfront and down the road as well?
Mike Downard
Yeah, so I think upfront the value is you're, you're really documenting your process, and you're putting it to the test. The great thing about Jira Service Management and Atlassian tools, in general, is the amount of flexibility they offer you. Now, it's a little intimidating again, for that end user. But that's why you bring in a professional services team to help you build it out the first time, teach you how to make changes on your own, and get the heck out of there. So, what we would want to do is start by building that first version so that they can see it. And then you can start to measure, okay, short term measure, how am I performing, you can use things like velocity or other common tools like that, to see how you're performing against your volume, you might actually even see your volume for the first time that you've never seen before, estimate based off of your inbox or your group inbox that might exist. And you're like, oh, I've got 10,000 requests, and I'm just going to work one by one through those. Well, now you can actually see them, and I can offer status back to those end users. Okay, that's a big one, I've got status that my end users can actually see, because there's no visibility as an end user, when I make a request, I can see all of my requests, because of the way that the security is built out, right? I don't see everybody else's requests, that's for the agent, the person who's executing the work to see, but I can see where mine is. And I can have some transparency into what's happening and what status and workflow my data is in. From a long-term standpoint, I can start converting this information into higher level actions, I can start converting this into trainable actions, I can start converting this into roadblock, removal and process improvements that I can't do without a documented process. And I can't do without some sort of baseline to compare things against. So, I think the power from a short term is great. Now I know what I have from a long term, what am I going to do about my problems and my challenges that my team faces?
Kevin Howard
Understood. I think that shows kind of the value behind implementing JSM, both short term and long term. Once again, wanted to thank you, Mike, for taking some time out of your day to speak with me. Was there anything else that you would like the audience to know about of these platforms?
Mike Downard
Yeah, I just think it's really important because these tools were originally built for engineers, to just bring in a team to help make that first step a little bit easier. You know, Silicon Mountain does it lots of other teams do a really good job with this. But they've removed that first barrier. If I'm, you know, a product that solves my problem has been thrown on my desk, when I have to go and learn that product before I even start doing the work. And I'm gonna meet blockers and resistance to that as a process. Well, you know, some people who are experts and invested their time in this process can really offer a ton of value to getting you started training you to do it yourself, so that you're not really just fighting uphill, there's great documentation. But doing it the first time is intimidating. So I think bringing in somebody who knows what they're doing, will give you a lot further and help with that change process that you're going to face help with the blockers of folks who just aren't going to adopt it by building out creative solutions and building out creative workflows to make sure we're still getting the value of tracking without overreaching and trying to undo what a senior member might be unwilling to participate in, and still getting that again, and value of the value of the measurable work. The removal of blockers.
Kevin Howard
Awesome. So yes, thanks again for taking some time out. I wanted to thank everyone out there for listening and thank you to our guest, Mike Downard. Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe to CarahCast and be sure to listen to our other discussions as well. If you'd like more information of how pure software Atlassian can assist your organization's digital transformation, please visit www.carahsoft.com/atlassian or email us at Atlassian@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.