Application Services Library

The Application Services Library (ASL) is a public domain standard, which describes a standard for processes within Application Management (the discipline of producing and maintaining information systems and applications). The term "library" is used because the ASL standard is based on the descriptions of best practices from the industry.

This standard was developed in the late nineties in the Netherlands, originally as the proprietary R2C model, which evolved into ASL in 2000. In 2001 it was donated by the IT Service Provider PinkRoccade to the ASL Foundation, now the ASL BiSL Foundation.

ASL is closely related to ITIL, BiSL and CMM. It is described in several books and articles (most of them only available in Dutch), as well as on the official website of the ASL BiSL Foundation.

The standard was developed because of the inability to structure the way of working within the Application Management departments by only using the ITIL framework, an older library embraced by the IT infrastructure departments for structuring their way of working. At the time of development, ITIL was very useful for infrastructure management but lacked specific guidance for application design, development, maintenance and support. Newer ITIL versions, particularly V3, have increasingly addressed the Application Development and Application Management domains. A reference to a white paper comparing ITIL V3 and ASL is included.

ASL was defined in order to fill this gap for Application Management. A similar development has led to the definition of the BiSL-standard for Information Management / Functional Management.