Capturing user location details

[Mayur Gaikwad/Tech PMO]

Hi,

How essential do you feel that Jira Service Management should have feature which when enabled can capture user location details as well. This should help build insights that from which part of region major issues / escalations are made.

Please share your thoughts!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Not in the slightest bit essential, and potentially illegal in places.  Have a read of my earlier essay.

[Paul Heath Armengol]

Essential, can't even add a phone associated with a client!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I think what I was getting at there was that "it's a lot harder than you think".  A corollary thought though was "it's probably the wrong way to get the data you need".  Is physical location really that useful in your analysis?  Surely it would be better to analyse by business group, customer, team, etc. 

[Shivam Desai]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- 

Very Detailed Explanation with broad aspects of thought coverage.

I too agree with your points. And I think as far as the project results are concerned, there is no significant difference made whether you are capturing the user's location or not.

Let me know your thoughts.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

This is something I ran into many years ago, and it's got worse rather than better.

Short answer is "probably not, because there's only really one reliable way to do it".

The long answer is "depends on how you do it".  There are a lot of ways you might try to do this, but the list of options is broadly:

• Ask the user.
  • Pro: you don't have to worry about security or privacy.  If someone chooses to tell you, it's fine.
  • Con: Many will not
• Tie the user to a known location
  • Pro: you'll always get the data
  • Con: it may be illegal for you to store or use that data (although it will not be within your organisation, because you can argue "relevant data")
• Use geo-location
  • This is the one I think will give you the greatest problem.  Simple answer to it though - don't even bother.
  • Con: the world is increasingly mobile, but because of the way I treat untrusted networks, I always look like I'm working from one of four places.  One of which I've not been to since a wedding years ago, and two others that I've never actually physically visited since before we had the web (I'm 3 years younger than the internet, but I was an adult when the web arrived)
  • Con: This one has to be done by story. 
    • When the BBC were expanding their online services, they had an absolute requirement to limit the content.  It's not quite as simple as this, but imagine you're looking for "in the UK and its protectorates / armed services / territories, and hence paying a licence fee, give people X.  Otherwise, give them Y".  You can still see some of this working in the UK - it tries to direct UK users to bbc.co.uk if it picks up one of them, but the rest of the world gets pushed to bbc.com.
    • So, when I worked there, we had a perfect example.  One of the UK railway lines bought a load of new trains from a German company.  The trains had built-in wifi.  Geo-location put these trains in Germany.  You can imagine the sort of support calls we got.

TLDR: yes, it could be useful data, but it could be a nightmare to get it. 

And do you really need it?  Does it really matter where someone is when they're asking for help?