In an enterprise, policies are the glue that hold network and systems management activities, tools, managed resources, and process participants together. Nevertheless, gaps between management objectives, policy definitions, and policy enforcement are inevitable during policy deployment. Policy definitions will rarely satisfy all management requirements and can be difficult to understand and enforce. Moreover, system administrators often ignore or circumvent policies intentionally or unintentionally in daily management activities. Policy-based management offers a promising solution to the problem of managing complex systems. It provides a means by which to simplify and largely automate the management procedure. These authors propose a policy lifecycle model, based on proven software development procedures; it can guide the deployment of a policy-based information management system in an enterprise.