I'm on the security engineering team at a SaaS company. Were couple hundred people. Spent part of last quarter building an automation pipeline: scanner finds a vuln, pipeline creates a Jira ticket with all the details, assigns it based on tags, pings the right Slack channel. Felt like a win. The manual ticket creation was eating hours every week.
So we launched it, it works perfectly. Tickets fly into Jira within minutes of a scan completing with a beautiful dashboard and everything automated end to end.
Except now I get to watch, in real time, as about 40 percent of those tickets land in unassigned and stay there.
The automation exposed what the manual process was hiding. When a human was creating tickets, theyd do the routing loop: check the CMDB, realize the owner field is stale, Slack someone who might know, eventually get it to the right person through sheer persistence. The automation cant do any of that. It reads the owner field. If the field says unassigned or points to a team that no longer exists or references someone who left, the ticket just sits there stuck.
So I automated the easy part. And now the hard part is actual ownership data, is the bottleneck and its more visible than ever. We didnt fix the routing problem. We just made it faster to surface.
Anyone else hit this? Any advice on how to fix the ownership mess?