Since the nineties, ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) has been used to improve the maturity of service
management processes, particularly in the area of technical infrastructure management. As it became
apparent that application management had additional needs, ASL (Application Services Library) was
developed and introduced into the public domain in 2002. Similarly, once it was realised that the
demand side of IT also had specific needs that were not addressed sufficiently by existing models,
there was a justification for a model for this domain.
In February 2005 a public domain standard for business information management called BiSL was
officially introduced and a book was published in which it is discussed in depth (Pols et al). BiSL
(Business Information Services Library) is designed to act as a comprehensive process framework for
business information management. It is supported by a growing number of best practices. Through the
publication of this book and the establishment of a foundation to maintain it, the first steps have been
taken to make BiSL part of the public domain and to produce a standard for business information
management.
This article describes the concept of business information management, the structure of the BiSL
framework that gives guidelines for this and the concepts that are underlying to the BiSL framework.