Aale Roos is a member of the EXIN Professional Group. He is a statistician who switched first to IT service business management and from there to IT service management consulting. His areas of expertise are service desks, service support processes, service setrics, ISO 20000 and the Art of making surveys. He started his consulting career in 1989.

His company Pohjoisviitta Oy, www.pohjoisviitta.fi helps Finnish companies on the path to better IT service.
He lives with wife and son’s cat close to the Northern Edge of Civilization in Helsinki Finland in a small house behind large apple trees.

• 12/03/2013 Beware of best practices
  The idea of a best practice is alluring. Instead of trying different approaches, just pick the best solution and move on. As Larry Cooper wrote in the previous column, it is not so easy. The IT...
• 12/02/2013 Secret Business
  IT should understand business better and all IT activities should be based on business needs. IT should talk more with the business. All true. But sometimes this is not so simple. There are cases...
• 21/12/2011 The Service Desk that could
  In my earlier columns I have been arguing that the current ITIL Service Desk model does not work. Now I’m trying to do something much harder, to describe a support model that works. This continues...
• 16/12/2011 Incident management is not a Service Desk process
  I tweeted about this and it seems that it surprised some people so I decided to explain this. Let us first have a look what the books say, as nobody actually reads the books. Incident is according to...
• 23/11/2011 Service Desk is an obsolete model
  The concept of help desk was originally invented in 1970’s but it got its current form in 1980’s and became popular in 1990’s. The Single Point Of Contact (SPOC) was a service innovation as...
• 05/10/2011 The missing support process
  One of the great ideas in ITIL was the separation of incident and problem. The idea was that it is not enough to keep solving incidents; you need to make permanent repairs also. The simple idea has...
• 29/08/2011 The word incident does not mean anything
  How many incidents you log per month? That used to be an intelligent question earlier. Nearly 100% of Service Desk calls or e-mails were logged as incidents. Many surveys showed that there was a...
• 23/05/2011 Making shoes for the cobbler's children
  The concept of service lifecycle was refreshing and widely approved when ITIL V3 was introduced. Talking about services instead of processes seemed to be a sign of more customer-focused thinking. It...
• 03/05/2011 ISO 20000 lowers the bar
  The first international standard for ITSM has been updated. ISO/IEC 20000:2011 is now the current version. The scope of the standard has not been changed; it is still the same ITIL flavored package...
• 14/04/2011 Idiot Management
  1. Introduction This guidance is meant for new IT professionals who are starting their careers in IT Service Management (ITSM). Congratulations, you are now among the chosen people at the top of the...
• 29/03/2011 Where is the customer?
  One of the surprising omissions in many ITSM frameworks is the lack of customer facing functions and processes. We have the service desk, demand management and service level management but that is...
• 10/02/2011 Effects of change management
  There are best practices for many things but in most cases they differ from ITSM best practices. Usually best practices are based on research. If a guide book tells you that you need to heat it to 70...
• 06/12/2010 Has ITIL killed Service Desk innovation?
  Yes, it seems so. The ITIL SPOC model is over twenty years old and it is definitely beyond its best before date. It is time to redesign it. Practitioners have been struggling with the conflict of...
• 02/09/2010 Service catalogs are difficult
  Only 2% have a proper and updated service catalog. This is the rather amazing result of a recent survey I did. It reflects the fact that the service catalog is not such a simple concept as it may...
• 01/06/2010 It is not so easy to define services
  It has never been very easy to define IT services. Today it seems to be more difficult than ever. This came up in a survey but it has also been discussed on various forums Survey resultsI did an open...
• 13/04/2010 Benefits of ITIL
  Is ITIL useful? What are the benefits, and is it worth the trouble? This is a study of the situation in Finland, where there has been a clear ITIL wave during the past six years. ITIL became popular...
• 16/12/2009 How to get good customer satisfaction results
  I suppose one way might be to offer better service, but that is not what I am writing about in this column. Improving survey results is easy and people do it all the time. Unfortunately, many do it...
• 24/11/2009 What is the market share of your service desk?
  According to my studies it is less than 20%, as users need on the average six (yes six!) attempts to solve a single problem. Do you know your numbers? Let me first explain what I mean by ‘market...
• 05/11/2009 Why are so many people discussing incident management?
  It is rather strange that there are suddenly several discussions on different forums on the nature of an incident. I have also noticed that the word incident is the top search term for hits on my...
• 09/10/2009 Can OGC fix the fatal flaws of ITIL V3?
  I finished my previous column just before the announcement of the new version, sorry edition, of ITIL. Now that OGC has announced that there will be a new edition, let’s try to estimate whether they...