Not all those who wander are lost.

-- Erik Zempel (with Tony Markel)

Sometimes you go looking for one thing and find another.   ZenDesk has been a great tool for us, but it costs a little more than we’d like to be spending on a ticketing system.  So we set off to find a replacement that included the things we liked about ZenDesk, but costs less to operate.  Initially, we set our sights on ServiceNow.  ServiceNow is an ITSM tool currently used by ITS and under investigation by MCIT.  There were all kinds of good, collaborative reasons to look at it.  

On paper, ServiceNow had all the features (and then some) that we were looking for.  And others in the “U” were looking at it as well.  Seems like an easy choice, right?  Unfortunately, even under a shared service model, ServiceNow wouldn’t give us the cost-savings we were after.  We’d be paying for features we’re not currently using.  What’s lean about that?

So we looked into other solutions and arrived at Atlassian Service Desk.  Service Desk is a younger product without all the bells and whistles of a full ITSM suite, but does almost everything we need it to. Almost.  It was sorely lacking a customer satisfaction survey.  Fortunately, Atlassian is very customizable and we were able to prototype a survey solution leveraging Qualtrics as the survey engine.

Is Atlassian Service Desk the final word in ticketing systems for MSIS?  No, definitely not.  But it’s given us a little breathing room in the budget while maintaining the capabilities we have today.  And the act of evaluating our ticketing system has given us a better understanding of what’s really important to us.