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.