In 1980 Edward A. Van Schaik (1934-2014) published the first of several volumes detailing IBM's Information Systems Management Architecture (ISMA), which was derived from pre-existing experience of IBM, especially from 1972 onwards, as well as a specific effort to pull all of the strands together from 1979. ISMA was a systems approach to the definition and management of IT services that has subsequently been influential in the development of other approaches such as ITIL.

Much of the work was done at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and defined generic IT business processes and methods for evaluating the effectiveness of an IT management system. The first volume was entitled "A Management System for the Information Business", which was followed by three further volumes through 1983.