At an Atlassian Presents: WorkLife event today, Atlassian furthered its efforts to integrate the tools technology and business professionals use to manage processes.
Erika Trautman, general manager and vice president of product for Work Management for All at Atlassian, said that as organizations increasingly rely on digital processes to engage customers, partners and employees, the need to facilitate collaboration across a diverse set of knowledge workers is becoming more pressing.
As part of that effort, Atlassian is now making generally available a Smart Links capability within the Atlassian platform. Smart Links can be used to integrate both Atlassian applications such as Trello and Jira as well as third-party applications. That capability is now critical because there has been a Cambrian explosion of adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that all need to be integrated into a common set of workflows, noted Trautman. Otherwise, each SaaS application environment becomes yet another walled garden that prevents any meaningful collaboration, she added.
In addition, the company announced that Atlas, a directory that tracks projects and simplifies communications across teams using disparate applications, will become generally available next month. DevOps teams, for example, will be able to synchronize Jira events with projects being tracked via the Atlas platform.
Atlassian has also streamlined the tools it provides to reduce the number of steps required to administer its applications and onboard new users.
Finally, the company also has launched Atlassian Together, a single subscription offering through which organizations can license its Trello, Confluence, Atlas and Jira Work Management applications delivered via the cloud. An enterprise organization with more than 5,000 users can now, for example, license those applications for $11 per user.
Atlassian is making a concerted effort to enable organizations to more easily collaborate at a time when they have become more dependent on software than ever, noted Trautman. In many cases, businesses are now trying to adjust to the rapid rate at which software is being delivered thanks to the adoption of DevOps best practices, she noted.
As such, there is a greater need for integration between tools such as Jira that development teams use to manage projects and a wide range of tools used by knowledge workers residing in various departments, said Trautman. In effect, Atlassian is trying to enable organizations to reduce the “collaboration tax” they incur as workflows span multiple silos, she added.
In fact, in many cases, organizations are struggling to keep pace with how agile software development teams have become. The irony is that not too long ago business executives routinely complained about how long it took IT organizations to adjust as business conditions changed. Now, many businesses are rolling out additional digital capabilities via software updates that can be made multiple times a month.
The rate at which organizations will collaborate across departments will naturally vary, but the days when each department was a fiefdom unto itself are coming to an end. The challenge and opportunity may now be determining how modern organizations should be structured once it becomes easier to collaborate.
