Report from the Atlassian Government Symposium

By Dick Stark

Last Wednesday, RightStar exhibited at the Atlassian Government Symposium, held at the Westin City Center in Washington, DC. This is one of a series of worldwide stops to promote Atlassian products, services and customer networking. Atlassian had a good turnout with more than 200 attendees. RightStar led a successful Jira Service Desk lab, one of the most popular sessions of the event. Here is a short summary.

How IT can adapt to the future. Jay Simons, Atlassian President opened the keynote with a talk about digital transformation and the pace of change, especially in government, and the potential impact. Like everywhere, government IT teams have to empower the rest of the agency, but it is up to every team to work together to manage increased expectations. Just like at Summit, Jay discussed the importance of IT Operations and briefly described:

Jira Software—how to manage work;
Jira Service Desk—service desk for every team;
Statuspage—absolute best way to communicate status of incidents; and
OpsGenie—powerful alerting & on-call management.

Government’s Largest Service Desk? Up next was a Sr. Systems Engineer that presented a case study which must undoubtedly be one of Atlassian’s largest accounts. She described how this agency grew from just a few Jira users in 2010 to more than 160,000 today. According to the presenter, prior to 2013, Jira usage was isolated and siloed by the various teams. In 2013, two systems merged into one and added 8000 users to the system, taking the agency to a total of 12,000.

By 2014, the agency was up to 27,000 Jira users and began using Jira Service Desk for incident management. By, 2015, the number hit 60,000 and today it is up to 160,000. What’s most incredible is that the entire system was supported with a team of only eight administrators.

Current 2018 statistics included:

Jira Projects: 2,600
Spaces 5,800
Jira issues: 1.5M
2018 Issues resolved 10,000
Service Desk agents 5

The statistic the speaker was most proud of: Customer Satisfaction. Her Jira Service Desk gets the best marks in the agency.

Jira Service Desk Lab. RightStar’s JSD lab was so successful, that there was standing room only. Additionally, there was plenty of interest in ScanStar for Insight and Jira, and our DevOps Sim. The future looks bright for Atlassian in the government space.

About dick1stark

I am the President and founder of RightStar, Inc, an XTIVIA company. RightStar is a leading ITSM and DevOps consultancy and BMC Software Elite Solution Provider and Atlassian Gold Partner. My passion is customer success—whether it’s reducing the cost of service management, improving overall efficiency, or increasing end-user or employee satisfaction. Since founding RightStar in 2003, RightStar has made the INC 5000 list four times. In 2011, RightStar was awarded the prestigious National Capital Business Ethics Award (NCBEA) by the Society of Financial Service Professionals based upon RightStar’s foundation of honesty, ethics, and integrity. And in 2014, RightStar was selected by Forrester Research as one of 13 North American companies profiled in its ITSM Consultancy Wave Report. In 2019, BMC selected RightStar as its DSM North American Partner of the Year for its sales and partnership excellence. Finally, in November 2020, RightStar was acquired by XTIVIA, an innovative IT Solutions Provider. Dick is a graduate of Stanford University and a Project Management Professional (PMP).

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