Clean data first. AI second. Everything else follows.

A career spent watching "dirty systems" block every transformation

Andy Barker (LinkedIn)has spent his career in digital transformation and change management, working across a wide variety of industries and roles. The pattern he keeps coming back to is a simple one: companies get blocked not by a lack of ambition, but by systems, processes and data that nobody has kept clean. Jira is often at the centre of it - the system of record for how work actually happens, quietly accumulating years of workflow sprawl, orphaned fields and unmanaged permissions that nobody signed off on.

It's a theme he sees everywhere he looks, including in his own conversations with vendors pushing the next wave of platform intelligence. Watching Atlassian invest heavily in AI and its teamwork graph, his read is blunt: none of it will land if the foundation underneath it is dirty.

The Challenge

Years of digital transformation work kept running into the same wall: dirty data and unmanaged Jira configuration quietly undermining every "bigger" initiative a client wanted to layer on top - AI included.

"Eat your own dogfood"

Andy is candid about which companies he trusts long-term in the Atlassian ecosystem, and the test he applies is whether they actually use their own product properly, on their own systems, the way they're asking customers to. Most large platforms, in his experience, don't.

Solcoro passing that test as a tool that gave him an honest, specific baseline on his own instance in the time it takes to get a coffee. This is part of why he now leads with it in his own client work.

Turning a scan into a diagnostic for every engagement

Fun Inc's client work spans commercial engagements and pro bono transformation support, including an ongoing role as last-mile experience consultant for a national charity partner. In both settings, Andy has started using a Jira and governance scan as the opening move of the engagement rather than something introduced later, once trust has already been built the slow way.

What the Scan surfaces before a project even starts

• Adoption gaps: whole teams not using Jira as intended, or not using it at all
• Configuration sprawl: workflows, fields and permission schemes nobody can fully account for
• Audit-log risk: issues deleted rather than archived, creating hidden risk ahead of any future migration
• A shared starting point: a scored, visual baseline both sides can look at together, instead of a written report one side has to take on faith

On one engagement, digging into a client's audit logs while investigating an unrelated permissions question surfaced a bigger issue: issues were being deleted outright rather than archived - a pattern that would cause real problems the moment that organisation tried to migrate or consolidate projects. It's exactly the kind of governance drift a standing scan is built to catch before it becomes a migration-day emergency.

The bigger argument

For Andy, the case for tools like Solcoro isn't really about any single scan - it's about which companies in the Atlassian ecosystem will still matter once the current wave of AI enthusiasm settles. His view is that the vendors investing in the fundamentals - clean data, clear governance, systems that actually work the way they're supposed to - are the ones with a real future, while attention chasing the AI trend without fixing what's underneath it will fade.

It's a message he repeats often, in conversations with clients and peers across the ecosystem: the AI layer is not going to rescue a Jira estate that's already dirty underneath. Fixing that comes first and a ten-minute scan is a fast, honest place to find out where you actually stand.