Customer Reviews

Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

A little introduction is in order - I've led ERP, data warehouse, product data management and infrastructure tool (Tivoli, BMC, etc.) implementations at fortune 500 and Global 100 companies. I've also spent a good portion of my career leading software development teams at small and medium sized software companies.

I can find a dozen books on the latest "software development methodology", .NET tool or java API. The challenge there is sifting through them all.

In the "managing IT" space, I've had to put up with management gurus who don't understand IT, and software developers who confuse project based IT with the management of IT assets.

To my knowledge, no book has ever covered the "management of IT" - Those things left behind by agile software development projects (great methodology for new stuff, btw) so cogently and so earnestly. There's no "philosphocal" smoke, and axes being ground here... It's just plain spoken common sense that you've thought about if you've had to manage large, in place systems, but never taken the time to articulate.

This book puts to words what thousands of IT Directors, managers and CIO's wish they had time to put to words. Check out the table of contents - What's in it is actually covered, and covered well... FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER!

If you're responsible for a large IT budget, you can't afford to *not* read this book.

As a recent inductee into enterprise technology architecture from the silos of network and server deployment, I was looking for a resource to serve as both a overall view of the IT organisation structure, and as a vision of making the IT organisation more useful to their enterprise customers.

From my perspective this book was great value, simply by informing me what I didn't know I didn't know.

Data modellers love to reduce their enterprise's line of business to a series of normalised entities; this book does a similar job for the IT business enterprise itself.

I see this book as being useful to people in at least the following scenarios:

* Those who are looking to advance their technology career into a more holistic view across technologies and indeed into understanding their customer's business.

* Those who wish to see how the various IT-related standards fit together inside the overall value-chain model. For example, it becomes clear that ITIL is not the be-all and end-all of the IT business.

* Those who are trying to convince their bosses and "technology silo" management as to the specific benefits of opening up those silos. The author's credibility is enhanced by calling out the major problems in the siloed approach, which completely resonated with my previous experience in silos (e.g. the chucking "over the wall" of new applications to operations, leaving a mess for operations to clean up). Furthermore, the author lays out a credible alternative based on fostering collaboration and the vocabulary upon which the various silos can collaborate.

* Those who are already-enlightened leaders can use this book as a blueprint or roadmap for future IT projects and operations - buying several copies of this book is more scalable than the leaders having to disseminate this vision in their own words.

* Those who are Enterprise Architects will become enlightened that indeed the IT group in their line-of-business enterprise can actually be considered an enterprise in their own right. This book gives plenty of ideas for building that IT enterprise architecture.

* Those who are trying to retain talent can do no worse to try-on the concepts presentented in their book. If the IT group has more automated business processes (as opposed to home-grown paper based systems) then your IT talent will escape a lot of the caveman work that seems to still hang around IT groups. With less caveman work, your IT professionals have more time to contemplate the bigger picture and work on higher value activities, surely leading to better morale.

* Those who believe in the "share before buy before build" approach can at least "buy" this IT strategy before "building" their own wheel.

One star is taken off this book because it is currently only published as a paper book and not in any kind of complete electronic version (in fairness though, various topics have a presence at the author's blog at [...]). When you're trying to persuade your fellow IT professionals as to the merit of a particular argument in this book, it would have been great to just be able to snip out the relevant argument and email it to them. Also, if you start initiating projects based on the book's advice, it would have been great to have an online reference to trace your IT-business requirements back to.

That said though, if you're interested in the bigger picture around IT from someone who's been there managing enterprise IT, give this book a go. We need the messages in this book to be amplified and therefore drive IT groups to maturity.

This book should be mandatory reading for CEOs of software companies and CIOs. Charles Betz is clearly intelligent, analytical and creative. He has pinpointed the issue of HOW IT needs to manage itself. He clearly illustrates the shallowness of hackneyed phrases such as 'run IT like a business'. Betz strikes the right note on the application of Enterprise Architecture to IT (or software development companies). He provides a perceptive Value Chain model and supporting material. Charles Betz addresses the need for an ERP for IT - correctly pointing out the risks and dangers. He deals with the contribution ITIL, COBIT and to a lesser extent CMM can make to the structuring of that 'Target Architecture' and where the gaps lie. His analysis of the ITIL framework is outstanding and should be mandatory reading for all ITIL practitioners. If you are about to implement a CMDB, you will find Charlie has provided an excellent dissertation on the challenging issue of granularity and scope. All in all a brilliant book. I wish I'd written it myself!! Rob Aalders (The IT Outsourcing Guide, The IT Manager's Survival Guide).

I am a long time IT person and bibliophile who is often dissapointed when books don't meet my expectations. This book has met my expectations and then some, I wore out my yellow highlighter, it has motivated me to do my first review. It is at the correct level of detail in my view, and has fantastic examples of data models and dialogs to clarify some of the fuzzier concepts. An example is a dialog on why data should be normalized, this should be very helpful to a business analyst the author uses this technique throughout.

I believe the book would be invaluable to anyone doing ITIL and will help cut through some of the vendor hype and nonsense. The author shares and has clarified some ideas I've had on multiple framework integration (their overlap and Gaps) and the effect on EA and repositories. This is the only book of its kind that I'm aware of that deals with multiple frameworks from a architectural perspective. The examples of mapping using matrices will get you started in the right direction. Definitions of a CI and different process areas and a illustrative model are provided minus the vendor biases.

Topics such as automated discovery and its role in CMDB population is discussed, with "gotchas". Here the level of detail is content from the the author's blog giving real world examples. The book also contains excellent models on structuring of internal IT systems and major IT internal functions. For example, where does Portfolio Management fit what are some of the potential connections and dependencies.

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 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.

Business and IT executives have a hard time trying to get business value from IT. Because of that IT Governance and several IT process frameworks (ITIL, CobiT, PMBoK, CMM...) has become a new fashion in business. Many frameworks, not so many clear returns in real life.

I'm one of those that spent nights reading and googling about this themes. In fact, since a CIO once told me that he had spent 20 years improving and automating business processes, but when he looked back to his IT organization, it had the worse processes in the entire company.

Charlez Betz's book was the best thing I've found so far. His pragmatical approach is just the language IT executives should use. Buy it, an send as a gift to the guys engaged in IT Governance initiatives at your organization.

Charles Betz wrote a great book. Betz's structuring of everything around the IT Value Chain and its support is excellent.

In fact, I would have easily given this book five stars if it were released a year or two ago. However, for all of his discourse on, and mapping to, ITIL, he choses to address ITIL version 2--the now six year old version of ITSM best practices.

Given that the third version of ITIL is due for publication at the end of this month (May 30, 2007), I think the book's release was poorly timed.

As one of the (non-paid) editors of the ITIL version 3 Service Transition volume (and one who is privy to the general contents and scope of the rest of the books, I fear this book's relevance in many of those areas which address ITIL will be short-lived. ITIL v3 represents a major rework for ITSM best practices and integrates them within the IT lifecycle.

Having said all that, Mr. Betz has put together a very engaging book, and is someone who is heavily involved in "the conversation" on these topics...but I would enjoy an update to this book which addresses ITIL version 3 instead of version 2.

Charles Betz has assembled THE handbook for running IT like a business. I believe that it is the only definitive source that clearly ties all the various IT management disciplines together into a symbiotic whole.

Symbiosis (pl. symbioses) is a close association between two different types of organisms in a community. It can be defined as: 'The living together in permanent or prolonged close association of members of usually two different species, with beneficial or deleterious consequences for at least one of the parties.'

Having worked in several enterprise IT organizations for over 20 years, I have been involved in different parts of the organism. Each part of the organism can do a good job of explaining/defending its role; however, the pieces seldom understand how the whole is intended to function. This book clearly puts the pieces of the puzzle together.

This book is very comprehensive and it will require concentrated study. My advice would be to get each member of the IT management team a copy, assign sections, and work together to walk through the book as a book study. Then and only then - use the knowledge gained to build your IT Business.

I'm not done with the book yet, but am about 50% through it. I can say that I've been an IT process & service consultant for the past 10 years (including lots of ITIL, CobiT, other frameworks and experience), and found many of the author's ideas insightful and compelling - I've already used a few of them at my new company. He "gets it" in a way that few do.

I can't wait to actually apply more of these ideas at my enterprise - highly recommend looking into this.