Required or desired behavior of systems and applications can be expressed in terms of management policies. Such policies can in turn be used to express expected operational characteristics of these systems and possible management actions. We feel that policies can provide the kinds of directives best used for flexible autonomic management systems. The effective use of policies in autonomic management requires that the policies be captured and translated into actions within the autonomic system. In this paper we describe an architecture for an autonomic management and illustrate how policies are defined and mapped into its executable elements and how they are realized as actions. A prototype implementation of the autonomic system for managing an Apache web server is described and the mechanisms for mapping policies presented.