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Sound guidance for application Management and Application Development. Written by Machteld Meijer and Mark Smalley (ASL BiSL Foundation) and Sharon Taylor (OGC)

This publication explains how both ITIL 2011 and ASL 2 define and address the Applications domain and provide the reader with an insight into how the frameworks can best be applied. Living Apart Together could qualify the relationship between ITIL  and ASL. They both have many common interests and frequently (have to) interact but it's also nice to have a home of your own.

When starting an  agile way of working in an organization, it turns out that there is little information about connecting agile to traditional departments  that use ASL, BiSL and/or ITIL. This ambiguity concerns the organization itself and the roles involved.

In this white paper, Jeroen Venneman, Jan de Vries  and Jan Leen van Duijn, have mapped ASL and BiSL processes to agile principles and the other way around. "This may seem to be in conflict", the authors say, "but it revealed the gaps, the overlap and the possible areas where they can strengthen each other."

The goal of this article is to describe the main purposes of ASL, BiSL and Agile and how the three make a perfect match to do your application management and business information management.

In this white paper Mark Smalley has listed 90 questions that 27 world leaders in IT believe that people in IT Service Management should be asking themselves. Ignore more than 600 years of wisdom at your peril!

In 2002, the Application Services Library (ASL) was launched into the public domain as a framework for application management. The adoption of ASL in the market was quite fast, and it was implemented in many organizations, primarily in the Netherlands. Due to the developments in the application management domain a new version of ASL (ASL 2) was published in 2009 to ensure the framework could keep on providing the answers to both present and future questions. In this article, Louk Peters and Machteld Meijer describe the main features of ASL 2.

In this white paper, Mark Smalley, shows that: 'People in the IT Service Management domain currently seem very interested in, but confused about, the concept of service catalogue. As a result, the services offered to the customer are often not formulated in terms that the business understands. These poorly described IT services lead to inequality – or asymmetry – in the relationship between business and IT, leading in turn to mistrust and ill-informed decision-making. This paper offers guidance how to structure a service catalogue so that they are more easily understood by the business.'

In this white paper, Rick Mans and Mark Smalley share some provocative thoughts about the democratization of the user community and innovative use of social media in application management (ASL) and information management (BiSL).

In this white paper, Mark Smallley introduces 'The Big IT Picture' as a paradigm and instrument to help people who encounter a new IT organization and have difficultly discovering who the players are, what they do, how they’re related and what systems they’re talking about. The Big IT Picture is a way of looking at the situation and asking the right questions and structuring, validating and communicating the answers.

Some of the problems after sourcing IT are caused by overestimating the ability to formalise the division of labour between the various internal and external parties involved. In this white paper Mark Smalley explores this domain and emphasizes the need for mutually closely collaborating sourcing partners to effectively deal with the inevitable gray areas in your information system landscape. An effective sourcing strategy is ‘loosely coupled if possible, and closely collaborative if not’.

Both ISO/IEC 20000 and ASL offer guidance for IT Service Providers, ISO/IEC 20000 giving broad guidance for IT Service Management and ASL focusing on the Application Management area. In this white paper, Machteld Meijer and Mark Smalley explain the relevance of ASL and BiSL in relation to ISO/IEC 20000. Positioning these three standards in a demand-supply chain illustrates the areas to which they contribute.

Application Management (AM) is an IT domain that supports organizations by keeping their applications up and running, up to date and under control. AM consumes about a third of IT budgets. But what keeps AM people awake at night? This white paper summarizes the results of Mark Smalley's workshops in Brussels, Hong Kong, Luxembourg and The Netherlands in 2009 en 2010, in which representatives of the AM community have expressed their views about the challenges they are facing.

Adoption of Cloud Computing – in particular Software as a Service – will confront the ‘business-facing’ Application Management function with changes that add extra complexity to the execution of approximately half of the processes that Application Management entails. Read more about the influence of Cloud Computing on Application Management and take note of the major recommendations in this White Paper written by Mark Smalley.

In this White Paper, Mark Smalley argues that Application management was initially pretty operational and reactive. About fifteen years ago, in response to the higher service levels that the user organisations required, we started investing in improvement of the maturity of application management processes. We are currently slowly moving towards a new phase in which we’re looking for an adequate response to the increasing complexity of a new generation of ‘virtual’ applications based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The areas that require extra attention are architecture, ownership (governance) and an ‘adhocratic’ kind of organization.

Hinley, D.S. & R. van der Pols, Barracuda Content Design; a methodology for the provision of Application Services (English)



Most businesses are now critically dependent on their application systems to some extent when it comes to the support of their business processes and providing pertinent management information to facilitate executive decisions. Organisations continue to make significant investments in application systems both in terms of their initial development and their continued maintenance. Indeed software maintenance is the most important contributory factor to system life-cycle costs. Maintenance and support of an application can amount to between 50% (IBM Research Institute) - 67% (Institute of DP Management) of the overall life-cycle costs. This places a great burden on any organisation trying to find sufficient funds to budget for the initial development of new or replacement systems that may be necessary to exploit new business opportunities.

Hagen, L. van der, D. Hinley, M. Meijer, R. van der Pols and P. Ruijgrok, Application Services Library® - Introduction Best Practices and Framework for Application Management, published by ASL Foundation, Voorburg, 2000, ISBN 90-806050-2-6.

This is the first book describing the Application Services Library, a knowledge repository containing articles, books, best practices and courses. The authors first describe the importance of application management, then they describe the framework for application management and finally they explain the importance of sharing knowledge within the public domain.

This whitepaper describes the ACM process cluster and the way it was applied at the Dutch Ministry of Defence.

A short description of some models as Een ITIL, BiSL and CMM and the positioning of between those models. 

Application management takes up a substantial and increasing part of available IT budgets. Organisations are concerned about these costs and ask themselves how they can get a grip on both costs and the benefits of application management. This subject has kept the authors of this article Mark Smalley and Machteld Meijer, intrigued for several years.  They have incorporated their insights in a contribution to a four-day postgraduate course on the Economics of IT-management, which has been organised under auspices of the Faculty of Economics of the University of Groningen. In this article the essentials from this course in relation to economical application management are expounded.