Companies House collaborated with Inetum UK&I to enhance their Change and Problem processes by successfully integrating Jira with ServiceNow, resulting in improved efficiency, streamlined communications between teams, and reduced reliance on external development expertise within just 10 days.
The Client
Companies House is an executive agency of the UK government, sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy. The organisation incorporates, and dissolves limited companies, as well as registering company information and making it available to the public.
There are currently more than 3.5m limited companies registered in the UK, with 500,000 new companies incorporated each year. To manage this, Companies House employs around 1,000 people in Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast and London.
The Challenge
Companies House needed help from Inetum UK&I to apply the control of ITSM with the flexibility of DevOps to their Change and Problem processes by integrating Jira with ServiceNow. Jira is used to storyboard development iterations and track bugs, as well as managing daily development reports and tasks.
Inetum UK&I was brought in specifically to implement a new, best-practice REST integration between ServiceNow and Jira. The integration enables ServiceNow to automate the management of work queues in Jira and was necessary due to a need for more effective problem and change management tracking.
Although complex, Jira is a popular platform with developers. Companies House attempted the integration internally but ran into issues owing to a deprecated integration method (SOAP) and a recent version release from Atlassian. Companies House had worked with other ServiceNow partners before approaching Inetum UK&I.
“We engaged with Inetum UK&I to help us with our Jira and ServiceNow integration. By doing so, we have seen significantly improved communications and efficiency between our business and development teams.”
Leanne Peters
Companies House
The Solution
The integration proceeded with the following key implementations:
- With Jira to better align development teams with other teams within the business to become more streamlined, more unified and more efficient.
- A transaction table to track both inbound and outbound updates. This makes it easier to monitor updates and re-process tickets in Jira.
- Dynamic field mapping which enables the client to apply future updates without code changes. This gives them the tools to run without needing third-party expertise in the future.
- All functionality configured within ServiceNow with no Jira updates needed. All updates automatically go from Jira into ServiceNow. This removes the need for Jira development experts and, with all information now stored in one place, it means it can be managed by one team instead of two.
The Benefits
The project was completed in 10 working days and provided the following key benefits to the client:
- Time saved by the business teams who now no longer need to manually update Jira as ServiceNow represents a single point of management. Previously, tickets had to be raised manually on Jira.
- Improved efficiency and communication between business and development teams due to mirrored updates between Jira and ServiceNow.
- Reduced reliance on Jira development experts.
- On-going ability to apply future updates without third-party help.
“Inetum UK&I listened to and fully understood the business challenges we were facing. The integration they performed, between ServiceNow and Jira, was completed in 10 days and has saved our internal teams valuable time. The Inetum UK&I consultants are very professional. The integration they performed between ServiceNow and Jira means we are seeing increased business efficiencies. I feel a valuable relationship and trusted partnership growing between our organisations.”
Leanne Peters
Companies House
Why Inetum UK&I
Inetum UK&I delivers best practice implementations that solve our clients’ problems now and into the future. We focus on data-driven mappings rather than hard coding, giving clients the ongoing ability to run on their own, and improve DevOps practices, without needing additional help from specialists.
