How would you feel if you visited your financial planner's office and saw past-due credit card notices on their desk? Would you trust an auto mechanic whose car backfires and produces black smoke? A dentist with bad teeth? A banker in shabby clothes? An interior designer whose offices are a shambles?

This is the position of the IT capability in many large organizations. The designated custodian of critical business processes and data does not manage its own processes and data reliably. A response in the form of Enterprise Resource Planning for Information Technology is emerging from major companies, research firms, and vendors; they are labeling these offerings "ERP for IT," "IT Resource Planning," and related terms.

This groundbreaking, practitioner-authored book provides an independent examination of and response to these developments. An analysis of the large scale IT capability, with specific attention to business processes, structured data, and enabling systems, it is essentially a comprehensive systems architecture, not for the business capabilities IT supports, but for IT itself.

Features
The book presents on-the-ground coverage of enabling IT governance in architectural detail, which you can use to define a strategy and start executing. It fills the gap between high-level guidance on IT governance, and detailed discussions about specific vendor technologies. It is a next-step book that answers the question: OK, we need to improve the way we run IT - now what? It does this through:

* A unique value chain approach to integrating the COBIT, ITIL, and CMM frameworks into a coherent, unified whole
* A field-tested, detailed conceptual information model with definitions and usage scenarios, mapped to both the process and system architectures
* Analysis of current system types in the IT governance and enablement domains: integration opportunities, challenges, and evolutionary trends
* Patterns for integrating the process, data, and systems views to support specific problems of IT management.
* Specific attention throughout to issues of building a business case and real-world implementation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Charles Betz is a Senior Enterprise Architect, and chief architect for IT Service Management strategy for a US-based Fortune 50 enterprise.

He has held consultant and architect positions for Best Buy, Target, and Accenture, specializing in metadata, configuration management, IT governance, enterprise application integration, and ERP systems. He holds a summa B.A. in Political Science and a Master of Science in Software Engineering, both from the University of Minnesota. Charlie is an active member of the professional community, belonging to the IT Service Management Forum, IEEE, ACM, and Data Management Association (DAMA). He presents frequently both locally and nationally to professional associations and conferences.

He is the sole author of the popular www.erp4it.com weblog.

Are you in the thick of sorting out how to make ITIL and COBIT work, and trying to make sense of the dozens of vendors clamoring to help?

Are you puzzled over how the ITIL vision for Change Management fits into the reality of your current processes? And how it relates to Enterprise Architecture and Portfolio Management?

Is the concept of configuration management and the CMDB giving off more heat than light for you? How can you make it real?

Have you found yourself wondering whether you really need an IT portfolio management tool, an enterprise architecture repository, a metadata repository, a service management tool, and a configuration management database (CMDB)? And if you have them, are you wondering if they should be related somehow?

The book presents on-the-ground coverage of enabling IT governance in architectural detail, which you can use to define a strategy and start executing. It fills the gap between high-level guidance on IT governance, and detailed discussions about specific vendor technologies. It is a next-step book that answers the question: OK, we need to improve the way we run IT - now what? It does this through:

* A unique value chain approach to integrating the COBIT, ITIL, and CMM frameworks into a coherent, unified whole

* A field-tested, detailed conceptual information model with definitions and usage scenarios, mapped to both the process and system architectures

* Analysis of current system types in the IT governance and enablement domains: integration opportunities, challenges, and evolutionary trends

* Patterns for integrating the process, data, and systems views to support specific problems of IT management.

* Specific attention throughout to issues of building a business case and real-world implementation.

Among the specific topics addressed are:

* ITIL recommendations from a practical systems implementation point of view
* Configuration management: challenges, misconceptions, myths, and realities. Business justification for. Support for compliance and regulatory goals.
* Interrelationships between IT portfolio planning, solutions development, and IT operations
* The relationship between application development and hosting (infrastructure) organizations
* Business intelligence, performance management, and metrics for the IT capability itself
* Detailed, actionable clarification of the vague concept of "IT Service" and all its permutations and implications
* IT portfolio degradation through complexity
* Detailed models of IT information
* The various classes of systems used internally by large scale IT organizations
* The concept of "repository" and its relationship to the Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
* Process roles and responsibilities. Closed-loop, self-reinforcing processes for IT data management.
* Application as critical control point and portfolio entry. Clarifying relationship between "application" and "IT service." Application portfolio management: process, data structures, and systems.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 18 Ratings

Too late for this book... - 2008-05-23
Reviewer Rating:
While this is a comprehensive book on ITSM that takes an architectural approach and has received many favorable reviews, it's too late to consider its information from other than a historical perspective now that ITILv3 has been released. If you are serious about adopting ITSM based on version 3, an updated book would be more relevant and useful. If your organization is already practicing version 2 of ITIL and doesn't intend to update practices to version 3 then it's a worthwhile read.

A book that respectfully bridges the IT business divide - 2008-05-25
Reviewer Rating:
Whether you're on the business side and are frustrated with IT's rigidity and cost excesses. Or, you're on the IT side and are frustrated with the business' lack of understanding of the complex technical issues at hand. This book is required reading.

Charles Betz - one of the world's leading practitioners in enterprise architecture and data management - brings together in an impressively accessible volume, his knowledge and experience of; what IT is; what it can do; and why an effective IT programme is so difficult to accomplish.

Unlike other books which I've read that tend to promote "_the_ way to success", Mr. Betz instead provides us with an overview of all modern best practices, and weighs their pros and cons, as well as their motivations. In this book, you will get the skinny on: ITIL; Service Oriented Architecture; Master Data Management; Enterprise Frameforks; Metadata; Business Intelligence; Business Process Management; and other relevant topics. But don't let all these terms scare you off, if you don't understand them. Mr. Betz provides the background and motivation.

For business folk:
The days of IT being considered just another department are over. IT now permeates every aspect of business, and at every level. If you have any aspirations to change or improve your business, a certain understanding of IT is now essential. In the same way that we all need to understand the rules of the road in order to drive (and realistically get anywhere in modern society). We also need to have a basic understanding of the principles behind IT to realistically get anywhere in the modern enterprise.

For IT folk:
While technologies and standards are constantly changing, what Mr. Betz is discussing in this tome is unlikely to change for quite some time. Case-in-point: ITIL v3 has since been released. However, there is nothing in ITIL v3 that isn't already stated in this book. Put another way, Mr. Betz explains the _motivations_ behind these standards and frameworks, so that any new standards and frameworks can easily be understood, and assessed for their core value. This includes ITIL v3.

Very good overall view of IT - 2007-10-28
Reviewer Rating:
Very good review of processes that need to be put into place to run IT efficiently. The author did a good job of keeping the book simple and interesting to read. As mentioned in other reviews, this is not a detailed implementation guide for ITS.

Poorly written on an Interesting topic - 2009-07-15
Reviewer Rating:
ITSM is not only an interesting topic, but a very necessary one in today's IT Industry, where majority of the companies simply struggle to maintain their application portfolio because of the poor understanding in doing so, as well as the disconnectedness in these aspects within these companies. When you move from smaller companies to larger ones, the size of the problems grow multi-fold. The successful creation of projects within these companies is a rare scenario and if created, which is mostly done by out-sourcing, maintaining them reliably is mostly on the edge of survival.
I was hoping that this book would provide some tips/insight, given its good reviews, I was very disappointed for many reasons.
1) I read more than 3 chapters in this book and it couldnt really keep my attention. First, this is a very wordy book, if you know what I mean. The author has made it difficult to convey the information or the message of the book in simpler words or language. If you cannot provide a context of the book in the first chapter or so meaningfully, you have basically lost the reader
2) The flow is very disconnected. The author has tried to borrow excerpts from lot of other authors, which by itself is not bad, but it has been done a little too frequently and the flow quickly seems sort of broken. You really want to see where the author is going with the message, and you see the others's comments within that context, but the way it is done within this book, the others' comments seems like forcibly introduced, apparently to indicate the author's knowledge and informativeness, but it has simple defeated the purpose
3) The author has probably written this book keeping only a smaller portion of audience in mind. As indicated above, this topic is necessary for much broader audience and dummy down the language would have been lot more effective.

Essential Reading for IT managers - 2008-10-09
Reviewer Rating:
As a 30 year professional in IT working as both a engineer and a manager, I have found this book to be the most readable and comprehensive book out there on the subject of IT Service Management. It surveys the current frameworks`out there ( ITIL, COBIT etc.) presents a more realistic real world frame work and provides useful guidance in a wide number of areas of importance to IT managers.

So well written it can be read cover to cover ( which I did) but with a useful index and sections for reference work. Most importantly you do not need to be a engineer to understand it and it is a perfect book for your senior management to really understand what it takes to run IT as a business.

I strongly recommend you get this and urge your peers and senior management to read it also.

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