If you’re leading technology in a South African organisation right now, you’ve probably felt the same tension: service expectations keep rising, while teams stay lean.
It shows up in the small moments that become big problems:
- A “quick” onboarding becomes three different tickets across three departments.
- An incident escalates, but no one has the full picture.
- Your service desk ends up answering the same questions again and again – because the knowledge exists somewhere, but it’s not actually reachable when people need it.
And the hardest part? This isn’t only an IT problem anymore.
Service pressure spills across IT, HR, facilities, operations and customer service, and when those teams operate in separate tools or separate queues, the handoffs become the work. Atlassian makes the same point: service management isn’t just for IT – teams across HR, operations and customer service need to be part of the service experience too.
This isn’t an ‘Atlassian vs non-Atlassian’ issue – it’s a service model issue
Whether an organisation is already on Atlassian or not, the patterns are surprisingly similar.
In non-Atlassian environments, it often looks like:
- Support spread across e-mail, calls, chat and spreadsheets;
- Inconsistent intake (not enough info captured upfront); and
- A lot of “please log a new ticket” energy.
In Atlassian environments, it can look like:
- Jira and Confluence are in place, but service is still mostly IT-only;
- Teams haven’t connected HR, facilities or customer service into one flow; and
- Automation and AI potential sits on the shelf because everyone is too busy firefighting.
So the question isn’t “Do you have Atlassian?”
The question is: Can your organisation deliver consistent service across teams – without adding headcount and without adding complexity?
That’s exactly the gap the Atlassian Service Collection is designed to close: enabling teams across the enterprise to create AI-powered workflows that deliver contextual, always-on support experiences for employees and customers.
The real bottleneck: service breaks at the handoffs
Chris Scheepers, Atlassian partner lead at Ovations, describes a common blocker in South African organisations: siloed support across departments.
“One issue most organisations are confronted with is siloed support across different departments: your IT, HR and facilities management … a ticket gets into a certain queue and now you have to move it to a different department to continue a process,” he says.
A simple example is onboarding.
Instead of one coordinated process, onboarding becomes:
- HR confirms the hire;
- IT issues a laptop (eventually);
- Facilities scrambles for a desk and access; and
- Managers chase progress through e-mail threads.
Scheepers’ point is practical: if HR, IT and facilities are connected into a single workflow, onboarding becomes one joined-up experience – with visibility for the manager to track progress end-to-end.
This is the shift South African tech leaders are looking for: fewer handoffs, more flow.
The second reality: lean teams, high expectations
Scheepers puts it plainly: “Another common challenge in South African organisations is that service teams are lean, but they have very high support expectations.”
That’s where the conversation around AI gets interesting – and also where many teams get sceptical.
The win isn’t “AI replaces people”. The win is AI removes the repetitive work so your best people can focus on the problems that actually need human judgment.
Atlassian’s Service Collection includes Rovo, which brings AI agents and capabilities designed to improve support experiences, service desk efficiency and operations management.
In practice, that means:
- Deflecting common questions through smart self service;
- Helping agents triage and resolve faster; and
- Reducing the back-and-forth that eats up time.
Scheepers highlights one capability that resonates with overwhelmed teams: once your service system has run for long enough, AI can analyse ticket history and surface repeatable resolution patterns – essentially helping teams generate standard operating procedures based on what’s worked before.
And importantly, it makes service work feel human again.
“I’ve seen the way that it can empower people … service desk agents who are bogged down dealing with mundane tasks… With the right configuration and AI in the right place, it gives people more time to focus on solving the really challenging issues and to learn from the experience.”
So, what is the Atlassian Service Collection –and why does bundling matter?
Once you’ve named the real issues (handoffs, silos, lean teams), the service collection becomes less of a “new product” and more of a new way to run service.
Atlassian’s Service Collection brings together:
- Jira Service Management
- Customer Service Management
- Assets
- Rovo
The important part isn’t just the list – it’s what becomes possible when these pieces work together:
- IT, HR, facilities and ops can run service workflows on one platform (not separate queues);
- Teams can deliver support to both employees and external customers, across channels, with AI assistance and cleaner handoffs; and
- Assets creates context around requests (so tickets don’t arrive “blind”) by linking items and dependencies to keep services running.
This is how you move from “service desk” to enterprise service management – without forcing every department to invent their own approach from scratch.
Where Ovations fits
Ovations is an Atlassian Gold Partner, and we work with South African organisations to make sure service design is practical – not theoretical.
That usually starts small:
- A short process discussion;
- Identifying where handoffs are breaking down;
- Mapping what’s already in place (whether Atlassian or not); and
- And deciding what a realistic “next step” looks like.
If any of the scenarios above sound familiar, let’s keep it simple: Join us for a quick virtual coffee (15-20 minutes). No pitch. No pressure. Just a practical chat about what’s currently slowing service down – and what an achievable improvement could look like.