From IRC to chatops: How every department can benefit from what IT teams have been doing for years

Workplace productivity tools have come a long way in helping teams communicate and operate, but the basics from the last 20 years remain the same: a good old keyboard and a chat tool. Back in the old days, IT and ops teams used to manage incident response and tasks through pioneering communication tools like IRC and AIM. Those teams used IRC and AIM to bring together team members to collaborate for a variety of reasons. Today, the same is still true, but a new set of tools have ushered in a new world of chatops that extends beyond basic chat functionality to incorporate deep integration to directly manage infrastructure, services, and other applications companies use in their day-to-day workflow.

To help you get a better sense of how chat has evolved, it is important to understand how things used to be. In the early days of IT using chat tools for operational issues, teams often needed to quickly come together from different locations. A DBA might have been on call at home, while a network engineer and the remainder of the incident response team were often distributed across several other locations. They all needed to communicate, and rather than using a conference call that was cumbersome and expensive, chat served as a quick and affordable way to have a record of the ongoing conversation. As new people were brought in, they could see the history and get up to speed without asking everyone to repeat what has happened.

The chatops advantage

This functionality continues today, but chatops has extended the model of using chat for just communicating—relaying information like status, insights, and questions, or asking someone to perform a task—to a model that connects people, tools, processes, and automation into a transparent workflow. The chatops explosion is driven by the intersection of traditional communications via chat with the massive availability of APIs across SaaS applications to perform actions and extract information.

For example, in the past an ops engineer would go to a different application to check on the service status, then share that information by typing it into the chat room. In the chatops world, this ops engineer can type a command into the chat window to display the service status. It shows the service as down, so she then issues a restart command directly from the chat window—all made possible by integration with service management applications. In this new world, there’s less need for context switching between tools and there’s a more robust recorded history of how the incident was managed, including the conversation and actions taken.

The five core benefits the chatops model:

1. In a group chat, everyone can see the history and progress of a project. New members get up to speed quickly of their own accord, and individuals are held accountable because everyone can see what was assigned to whom.
2. Teams can be pulled together instantly around a specific need, across multiple departments and geographies. No calendar invites; no meeting rooms. People get to work right away, and latecomers can scroll up to see what they missed.
3. Efficiency. Chatops eliminates communication silos. No more sending email into a black hole and wondering if you’ll get a reply. Integration with other applications saves time switching between screens.
4. One source of truth. Communicating across a dozen channels leaves information spread out and hard to find. Teams often work on competing priorities using old data. With chatops, conversations are all searchable in one place.
5. New employees can look through histories to see what issues have arisen, how they were tackled and who played what role.

Chatops for all

The ability to assemble a multidisciplinary, global team in a single digital location is incredibly powerful. Chatops supports a style of work that’s more agile, fluid, and distributed—and can apply to any type of work, not just IT teams. Businesses are now adopting the model in areas like incident response, customer care, sales or simply to collaborate on other business projects more efficiently.

Here are some of the ways that forward-looking companies are putting chatops to work.

Customer service

Social networks have changed customer interaction forever. Brands need to monitor what customers are saying online and respond quickly. A bot can pull these communications into a chat room where a customer care representative can respond without needing to open other applications. Reps can also see at a glance which comments have already been resolved. This model can be used for tweets, product reviews, or numerous other channels in which customers (or potential customers) are active. 

Hayneedle, an online retailer for home furnishings and decor, uses chatops for customer care in yet another way. If a rep in a call center needs help with a customer question, they post the question to a chat room where someone from internal support can help with the answer. It’s quick, easy, and the customer gets better service.

Incident response

Whether it’s a security breach, cloud outage, or something else, all businesses experience disruption. Chatops allows you to assemble the right team quickly to investigate and respond to incidents in real time. Different groups can be set up for different teams—technical, finance, legal, etc.—and senior executives can drop in to get the current status.

Project collaboration

When the nonprofit Code.org did a major redesign on its website, it invited stakeholders to join a chat room where they could comment on screenshots and stay up to date with the work. Employees not involved with the project were invited to drop in, check out the work and offer ideas. This creates ambient awareness in organizations, meaning people stay abreast of what’s happening even if they aren’t directly involved. It’s a good way to foster cohesion among disparate teams.

Projects don’t have to be formal or long-lasting. Unexpected events crop up all the time and you suddenly need a crack team to solve them. Chatops allows you to assemble that group quickly, with a historical record of the conversation stored in one place.

The sales pipeline

Sales teams use chatops to provide a more personalized pitch and close a deal in real-time. When a new client walks into a car dealership, for instance, a rep can open a chat room for that customer and invite colleagues from finance, insurance, servicing, and their manager to join. As the rep collects information about the client, the team downstream is armed with the knowledge they need to optimize the sale in real time.

There are several chatops tools in the market. In a software-driven world, success is often defined by whoever can react most quickly to changes in the environment. Chatops is a singular team-messaging-based practice for winning that race. Creative problems demand human to human interaction, yet distributed, multidisciplinary teams are becoming the new normal. Chatops bridges that divide, maximizing the customer experience and driving your business forward.

Thanks to Oji Udezue, head of product for Stride at Atlassian, for contributing to this post.