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.

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.

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’.

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.