It Organization: Building a Worldclass Infrastructure

by Stuart D. Galup, Guy Nemiro, Harris Kern

Organizing IT for excellence in 21st century distributed environments Few organizations are achieving their goals for reliability, availability, and serviceability in distributed environments - and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0130222984
• ISBN13: 9780130222985
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Length: 188 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 7.3" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant concepts

I think that it is the best book for entire IT organizations. It takes you trough the journeys from basic and general concepts to concrete and specific topics of technology field. I sense that the writer has a enormous experience as well as knowledge in many areas of IT infrastructure. I strongly recommend this book as an asset.

Flawed, but some excellent concepts make it worthwhile

This book has some flaws, such as the table of contents that reminds me of my first c program with pointers going off into the ozone. I managed to eventually become proficient in c. By looking past the book's flaws I managed to discover some valuable concepts and ideas for getting a handle on the thorny problems of aligning IT with business requirements.One of the most valuable concepts in the book is an IT organization that is defined by technology layers as opposed to products. For example, a compelling arguement is made for organizing the systems administration function as a single group without regard to what brand of system is being administered. The same argurment applies to organizing DBAs, network administrators, etc. in the same manner.This is a powerful concept that has a lot going for it. For example, in the traditional organization system administration is performed by a number of groups, each focusing on NT, UNIX, etc. This promotes a disjointed and non-repeatable set of processes - if there are processes at all. This, in turn, leads to an IT organization that has no clear internal communications, a cacophony of wildly different processes and methods, and multiple agendas. It reinforces the business side's common complaint that IT of out-of-control, with no unified vision, as well as another often heard complaint that IT provides conflicting advice and are their own worst enemy.Contrast the above with the organizational model that is proposed in this book: all functions are grouped and held together by a common set of processes and procedures. One easy-to-spot advantage of this type of organization is that service delivery becomes easier. Problems such as synchronizing batch processing (essential to data warehousing), aligned maintenance windows and uniform approaches to problem management become manageable because everyone is on the same team. Another advantage is a leveling of process maturity. Mainframe administration processes are lot more mature than those employed by your typical NT administrator, who would benefit greatly by "discovering" what was probably in place before he or she was born. And the business - the real reason we IT professionals exist at all - will benefit from the improved and reliable delivery of services and support.There are gaps in some of the processes and organizational paradigms, as pointed out by other reviewers. These will require some thought on the reader's part to work through and fill. On the whole, however, I found the book to be a valuable source of concepts and ideas. The flaws and gaps are offset by some iteas that I though were excellent. Because I personally gained a much deeper understanding of how to align IT to better meet business needs I gave the book 4 stars (only because I cannot award it 3.5). In spite of the flaws and gaps I do highly recommend this book and hope that potential readers will look beyond the warts and find the enlightening information buried between the

A really good and current book

It is really a very good book, it gives a very current focus of the topics. I think that it is the best book on the IT organization that I have read. It treats the topics in a global way and at the same time gives you the concrete critical facts of each part. It is noticed that the author has a great experience in IT. It hurts that there are not many books with this quality. Sometimes would be necessary more pictures to explain the topics. The price is a bit expensive but it is worthwhile.