Meet the client
The Hungarian Intellectual Property Office, HIPO for short, is no ordinary organization. Established in 1896, it single-handedly fulfills all patent and intellectual property-related needs of the general public, from private individuals to the largest corporations. This includes, among other things, processing industrial property applications, advising the government on IP protection strategy and policy-making as well as cooperation with European and global organizations to strengthen such efforts.
Understand the challenge
Because of the amount, range and nature of the tasks it handles every day, HIPO needed a double-duty service desk solution. Meaning software that channels all tickets through a single point of contact and friction-free service workflows to effective and timely solutions – and does so while delivering the level of security required by an organization that classifies as grade 4 (with 5 being the highest) based on the risk of secrecy, integrity and availability of the electronic information systems used and the data processed as per Hungary’s Electronic Information Security Act.
The agency’s legacy service desk system no longer met these demands.
It offered a single input field for HIPO’s 230-strong workforce to type in any request they had or incident they had encountered without sorting them. This means that a member of the IT and DevOps team first had to manually wade through the incoming tickets and decide the order in which they should be handled. All this without having a clear understanding of the business needs behind many of the user requests. Plus, the service desk inbox often got clogged with queries that shouldn’t even have landed at IT to begin with, such as requests for help with editing email templates.
Explore the solution
By 2019, it had become clear that the agency needed new IT service management software that can triage, track and assign and even add metadata to incoming requests, unburdening IT personnel and allowing them to start working on solutions with renewed focus. More specifically, it needed advanced form building capabilities for admins to create custom fields or reconfigure requests and, ultimately, get more structured information from the users creating issues and the team members sorting them. Jira Service Management fit the bill perfectly.
As the CEE region’s only agile- and DevOps-powered Atlassian Platinum partner, we were asked to help HIPO find and implement the right tool for the job.
Feature-packed yet hassle-free, Jira Service Desk came out on top. After four weeks of in-depth assessment and documentation of roles and workflows within the organization, we identified integration points for a fast and focused rollout process. To ensure that HIPO has maximum control over security and regulatory compliance, we opted for on-premise deployment. Delivered in two-week sprints, implementation started in October 2020 and entered the testing phase in a little over three months.
See the results
Thanks to the new IT service management tool and our continued support for users, tickets are now delivered to service desk colleagues sorted and labeled. As a result, IT can better balance service desk workload, find performance bottlenecks and accurately report to non-IT leadership on the productivity gains as well as the time and cost savings realized.
For example, when the desk received a flurry of complaints regarding video conference service availability, Jira logs quickly revealed that local, not network-level, issues were behind the glitches. Ones that didn’t require full service desk capacity. Had HIPO still been on the old system, this would have been impossible to detect.
Another plus side of Jira turned out to be its capacity to digitize workflows that have traditionally been paper-based from start to finish. The existing physical change management and approval process was recreated in the digital space and added to the service desk software, marking a huge milestone in HIPO’s digitalisation journey.
“We can do a lot of things in Jira that used to require external support, which saves us plenty of time and resources. It also allows us to tailor its functions to our exact needs. Everyone with grievances against the old system could contribute to setting up the new one. This is integral to our success as an organization moving forward.”
Tivadar Bognár, CIO, Hungarian Intellectual Property Office