CarahCast: Podcasts on Technology in the Public Sector · Carahsoft

Securely Transforming Higher Education with the Atlassian Cloud Platform Part 1

·20 min·1 clip

A 15-minute projector outage can affect instruction, and an hour can make class impossible.

1. CarahCast’s "Securely Transforming Higher Education with the Atlassian Cloud Platform Part 1" focuses on UConn’s digital transformation through Atlassian tools. 2. Anthony Jimenez hosts for the Carasoft production team, Elisa Aviles-Bodwin is Atlassian’s Lead Solutions Engineer for SLG, and Will Harris is UConn’s Atlassian Application Administrator. 3. The episode asks how UConn used Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management to unify service delivery across a large university. 4. Will Harris says he started at UConn 10 years ago as a student worker and later accepted a full-time position after graduation. 5. He describes learning the university’s ticketing system, routing tickets through a large IT organization, and then helping design and implement the Atlassian suite. 6. UConn began with a data center implementation of JSM, Confluence, and Jira in 2019 and moved the suite to the cloud in early 2021. 7. The migration finished in January 2022, and Harris says the university more than doubled its licensed users afterward. 8. He also says UConn added more than 20 new JSM projects and expanded the tools from central IT to all major IT groups. 9. The team built intake by studying years of ticket data from the previous issue-tracking system and identifying the most common issues. 10. Harris says teams then turned shared-mailbox web forms into Jira intake so requests could route with less friction. 11. The classroom support example shows why timing matters, because a 15-minute projector outage affects instruction and an hour can stop class. 12. UConn responded by creating remote tools that let staff manage PCs, touch panels, power controllers, and other classroom equipment from their desks. 13. Harris says the tools were then organized into a Confluence space with one page per classroom. 14. Each classroom page includes photos of equipment, room-specific support tools, asset records, maintenance history, warranty information, and linked Jira tickets. 15. The episode also explains how those pages made training new staff easier and improved support speed during high-pressure classroom incidents. 16. Harris says UConn’s distributed IT groups once used separate issue-tracking solutions and sometimes had to tell users to call another number. 17. He says every IT unit now shares one Jira instance, with visibility into other teams’ projects and the ability to create, move, and link issues. 18. Elisa Aviles-Bodwin frames that change as six years of collaboration, leadership buy-in, and acting as partners instead of forcing teams into a central system. 19. Listeners who work in higher-ed IT, service management, or campus support will get the most value from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting entertainment or a light general-interest conversation may skip it.

As heard by us

A practical look at how UConn broadened Jira service management through incremental adoption.

Higher education service delivery makes a grounded test case for digital transformation in this review of the University of Connecticut's shift toward a broader Jira-based service model.

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Why you'd press play

You want to see how UConn routed existing support forms into Jira without making customers relearn the front door.

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