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.

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 v3 and ASL 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 v3 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. 

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. 

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