2229H-4

Organizing IT for excellence in 21st century distributed environments

Few organizations are achieving their goals for reliability, availability, and serviceability in distributed environments—and the obstacles aren't technical, they're organizational. How does one structure an IT organization to succeed with today's tools and architectures? IT Organization: Building a World-Class Infrastructure delivers realistic, specific answers that draw upon the experiences of more than 40 leading companies. You'll discover how to:

• Design your organization to deliver "any data, anywhere, anytime"

• Combine mainframe-class discipline with 21st century flexibility

• Treat your network like you treat your data center

• Organize around business-critical support functions instead of trendy technologies

• Establish standards without imposing rigidity -- and achieve discipline without bureaucracy

• Overcome the myths that prevent IT organizations from succeeding

Harris Kern and his colleagues have built a worldwide reputation for evaluating IT organizations and identifying solutions -- fast. This concise, to-the-point book will help you do the same. Here are the right questions to ask, specific "people and process" techniques that work, sample SLAs and internal support agreements -- everything you need to make change happen, now!

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 12 Ratings

Intro to the series - 2003-09-26
Reviewer Rating:
This book is basically the introduction to "Harris Kern's Enterprise Computing Institute". This book is mediocre, but the rest of the series is very good.

If you really want to build a world class infrastructure look to _IT Systems Management_ by Rich Schiesser. It's also in this series and is everything this book is not.

_IT Systems Management_ does not really cover desktop support/helpdesk issues, its one minor shortcoming. For that look to _IT Problem Management_ by Gary Walker, also in this series.

You'll find both _IT Systems Management_ and _IT Problem Management_ here at Amazon, and they are both highly reviewed and they will be much more helpful than this book.

A smattering of ideas but not a battleplan - 2005-01-19
Reviewer Rating:
The most interesting statistic in the book was the fact that of 40 major corporations studied, not a single one could do client/server infrastructure successfully. Oh, well. I did feel that this book was a bit too much of an advertisement for the author's other services, and it took some discipline to read it.

Nevertheless, there are some good ideas worth taking note of--I would suggest using a yellow marker and Post-it notes to come back to later. Much of the advise is well-known aphorisms, but being cliche is not the same as being irrelevant. It is just that I was hoping for a meatier treatise on how to create the world-class infrastructure, and this felt more like an executive summary.

There is a great quote on page 41: "Unfortunately, processes should only be designed and implemented by the folks in the trenches, not by people who are far removed from the front lines." I agree, but my feeling is that this book may be targeted towards those far removed from the fighting but who have budgetary approval authority for consulting services.

Disappointing. Don't expect insights nor explanations... - 2002-09-22
Reviewer Rating:
ABOUT ITS CONTENTS: I bought the book because of its table of contents. Reading the book was very disappointing. After nine chapters, whose structure I'm still trying to figure out, I have read lots of tables containing the same information stated from different points of view, some organizational models that the author criticizes without telling you how he came to discover that the model doesn't works. During the lecture you'll find lots of recommendations for reading other books the author wrote himself (i.e. Building the New Enterprise, Managing the New Enterprise). Sometimes I felt I was reading an editorial catalog containing a reference of the books I shouldn't miss. In my opinion, if the problems were mentioned, the author should have analyzed them in detail, because they were tightly related with the topic being presented.

ABOUT ITS VALUE: It seems to me that the author has succeed reorganizing some IT departments and now he wants to write about his experiences. But how would a consultant benefit himself from reading another one's experiences when there aren't explanations, recommendations, choices, roadmaps, deployment guidelines, impact analysis (budget, time, employee morale, issues, risks, etc.). Buy the book only if you want to know what could be going wrong at your IT department, not as a guide for building your new IT infrastructure.

Disappointing. Don't expect insights nor explanations... - 2002-09-22
Reviewer Rating:
ABOUT ITS CONTENTS: I bought the book because of its table of contents. Reading the book the first time was very disappointing. After nine chapters I had read several tables containing the same information stated from different points of view, some organizational models that the author criticized without clear explanations. I found lots of recommendations for reading other books the author wrote himself. Sometimes I felt I was reading an editorial catalog. Because of the references I decided to buy some of those books. After reading three other books I decided to rewrite my review. The book has lots of ideas that help reorganizing an IT department, but the book itself is nothing but an update that summarizes concepts that were explained in other books.

ABOUT ITS VALUE: The author has succeed reorganizing IT departments and he wants to write about the importance of applying mainframe administration paradigm to client/server solutions. The book is helpful only if the reader wants to know what could be wrong at the IT Department. Although there is a proposed model, there aren't specific recommendations, choices, roadmaps, deployment guidelines, impact analysis (budget, time, employee morale, issues, risks, etc.). The model isn't complete. The author doesn't explain how to structure and integrate applications development teams, corporate applications administration, decentralized IT support personnel, and outsourced areas among other important functions. The project management function is mentioned but its explanation is avoided.

Really, really bad - 2003-04-02
Reviewer Rating:
This book is awful. There were at LEAST 15 comments like: "for more information on this topic, please read our book ....." The fact is, I was reading THIS book, and the information was not there. The length of the book, apart from the appendix, is only 120 pages, and there are so many graphs and charts in here, that there isn't any real meat to this book.

Maybe the authors knew what they were doing by telling us to go read their other books.

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Enterprise Computing
IT Management

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Enterprise Computing > IT Infrastructure
IT Management > Enterprise Systems and Infrastructure