Jira is King

A wise man once told me "Jira is King". That is not meant to be advocacy for Atlassian over other vendors with equally complete toolsets. If your organisational toolset is already complete you should probably stick with it.

The phrase "Jira is King" is a concise way of advocating that you should use your tools when you need them. Always choosing the right tool out of the box. Use them well, and the results will be pleasing. Vice-grips and duct tape can solve all problems, but there are more elegant solutions if you look at the other tools.

More importantly, "Jira is King" is a philosophy about the whole toolbox. Once you have committed to Jira, or an equivalent solution, stick with it. As systems need to be replaced or upgraded, strongly migrating to the complete solution you have in the toolbox.

You have a shiny new toolbox with everything in it that you need. Just because you used to have a blue screwdriver and the one in the new toolbox is yellow, doesn't mean you need to shop for a new blue screwdriver!

It pains me to discover that some organisations are still cobbling together bespoke solutions of outdated software, raw databases, and paper. Organisational inertia causes these companies to replace each outdated piece with more cobbled together parts, without discovering cloud solutions at all!

It is not anybody's fault that these organizations have not learned about the cloud. Their I.T. departments are given requirements from the functional groups, and dutifully implement them. The functional groups down ask for a cloud solution, because they don't even know what that means! Why would they? It is practically science fiction if it is not your field.

Even many I.T. people have yet to understand the full impact of cloud solutions to the computing world. Why are there any non-portable computers being installed that aren't in data-centers? Who wants the hassle of resolving problems that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have already solved?

I.T. groups are often given the mandate to just do whatever the functional groups ask for. Makes sense, right? There is no reason for a pulp and paper mill or a supermarket chain to have "cloud evangelist". Most organizations with less than 10K people probably have nobody in them who knows what the cloud even is.

I'm sure even Atlassian doesn't solve their own data backup, geographic redundancy, and fault tolerance issues. Yet there are still I.T. groups being asked to design systems with requirements definitions that look like they came from the 1990s.

So here is an open call to I.T. organizations everywhere:

Please read up on the cloud. Become familiar with Jira and similar products. A single good AWS designer and solve as many problems in a day as a whole I.T. department could in a year decades ago. Functional organizations will ask you to solve problems one at a time:

• inter-organisational communication and process management
• problem tracking
• data backup and archiving
• reporting and tracking

Jira can solve all of these without writing a single like of code. If Jira can't solve it, you can tack on a solution with AWS to address your need, which is likely a legacy system integration problem that disappears eventually.

Jira is a complete standard toolbox. AWS can build any tool that is not already in the box. Why are you still going to the hardware store? Or worse yet, building tools from scratch?