The promise of Long Term Evolution (LTE) is its ability to deliver high data rates with the high quality of service (QoS) needed for a variety of applications without extensive operational overhead. To this end, self-optimizing networks (SONs) provide a 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standardized framework for self-configuration, self-optimization, and self-healing in LTE networks. Alcatel-Lucent is positioning extended SON as an extension of the SON concept to include the end-to-end network environment, including the application domain and user equipment (UE) clients, as well as associated network and user policies to enable complex optimizations to be applied for specific users and/or applications. This paper presents the drivers for LTE SON, Alcatel-Lucent's vision for SON, and the evolution towards extended SON with representative use cases and a discussion of the proposed architecture.