Lessons in Grid Computing: The System Is a Mirror [Hardcover]

Stuart Robbins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 21, 2006

"You should not overlook the potential genius in this concept."
--Geoffrey Moore, consultant and author, Dealing with Darwin

"Since he first identified 'information systems as mirrors of the people who build them' for me, I have seen it operate in many ways. It is a fascinating idea, and a completely new way of thinking about technology."
--Sean Moriarty, Chief Operating Officer, Ticketmaster

"This book makes for compelling reading--it's easy to become immersed in the stories, and the insights gradually grow in the reader's mind as they take root in the character's minds. This is quite a useful work. The ideas presented here could be quickly put to practical use in any organization."
--Mohamed Muhsin, VP and CIO, The World Bank

A breakthrough exploration of information systems as mirrors of the people who build them.

Packed with truer-than-life stories, stimulating characters, and unique IT analysis, Lessons in Grid Computing finally declares:
* Our systems will not "talk to each other" if our people are not talking to each other
* We must transform ourselves to the same degree that we want to transform our systems
* To correct problems in our information systems, we must first address the problems between the people that build and support them

Discover how to adjust your management style to enable the next generation of technologies with the help of Lessons in Grid Computing.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Blending a compelling narrative, engaging short stories, and razor sharp observations, Lessons in Grid Computing: The System Is a Mirror draws on author Stuart Robbins's gift for storytelling and IT analysis to provide a groundbreaking approach to grid management theory. This breakthrough and inventive guide capably reveals his belief that IT systems are mirrors, reflecting the dynamics and dysfunction of the people who design, build, and manage our technology ecosystems.

The greatest handicap observed in any technical organization, large or small, is the nearly universal inability of technologists to adequately explain themselves—to their executives, to their customers, even to their spouses. Emphasizing the management of not only the systems but the relationships between the people who build and support them, Lessons in Grid Computing bridges this communication gap by following believable protagonists on fictional, yet real-world, struggles to overcome the many technical and management challenges faced in business today.

By addressing how computer and social systems are conceptually intertwined, Robbins identifies the primary elements of grid computing in an accessible manner that allows readers to easily understand them and apply them within their own organizations and projects.

Each provocative IT theme—including layoffs, insubordination, virtualization, organizational architecture, complexity/simplicity, venture financing, identity, intellectual property, orchestration, innovation and more—is vividly embedded in a story that makes IT management come to life. Written for chief information officers, C-level executives, and IT professionals at every level of the industry, Lessons in Grid Computing demonstrates how we must change our management behavior when we adopt new technologies. Written for a wider audience, these stories provide an insider's glimpse of the daily lives of characters who happen to populate the world of IT, characters with frailties and insights, successes and tragedies, good days and days when they would rather have stayed in bed.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Lessons in Grid Computing: The System Is a Mirror

"You should not overlook the potential genius in this concept."
—Geoffrey Moore, consultant and author, Dealing with Darwin

"Since he first identified 'information systems as mirrors of the people who build them' for me, I have seen it operate in many ways. It is a fascinating idea, and a completely new way of thinking about technology."
—Sean Moriarty, Chief Operating Officer, Ticketmaster

"This book makes for compelling reading—it's easy to become immersed in the stories, and the insights gradually grow in the reader's mind as they take root in the character's minds. This is quite a useful work. The ideas presented here could be quickly put to practical use in any organization."
—Mohamed Muhsin, VP and CIO, The World Bank

A breakthrough exploration of information systems as mirrors of the people who build them.

Packed with truer-than-life stories, stimulating characters, and unique IT analysis, Lessons in Grid Computing: The System Is a Mirror finally declares:

• Our systems will not "talk to each other" if our people are not talking to each other
• We must transform ourselves to the same degree that we want to transform our systems
• To correct problems in our information systems, we must first address the problems between the people that build and support them

Discover how to adjust your management style to enable the next generation of technologies with the help of Lessons in Grid Computing: The System Is a Mirror.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (July 21, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471790109
• ISBN-13: 978-0471790105
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.2 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,050,918 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

When I was twelve years old, on a particular Saturday afternoon at the public library (Danville, Illinois - circa 1965) I pulled a book from one of the shelves to pass the time and read the opening paragraph. I don't remember the author or the title but I remember the sensation - the feel of the book's cover on my knees, the yellowish light from overhead lamps, and the realization that such paragraphs are written by real people, words that last long after the writers are forgotten. I've wanted to write a book since that day. In that way, independent of sales or reviews, the Mirror book succeeded. And it was not too long ago that my son discovered a copy in the window of a local bookstore, so the wonder of this odd preoccupation has now been passed to the next generation.

The book itself? It is certainly not the technical treatise portrayed on the cover, though I will confess to more than 20 years in Silicon Valley as an IT manager and almost 3 years of research and writing. First and foremost, they are stories, stories about people with anxieties and sadnesses and in-laws who've lost their memory, people much like those we all know. Like Goldratt's "The Goal" in which a very real business principle is conveyed in a narrative, there's much in the book that deserve's a businessperson's time - and yet, in the end, the important aspects of the book are the stories that emerge: an illiterate executive who cannot read to his daughter at bedtime, a woman who understands cybernetics better than she understands her husband, a successful entrepreneur who is ashamed of his meager childhood.

Other publications? Dozens of industry white papers, some recent essays now categorized as Creative Non-fiction, a few short stories (one forthcoming in reprint as an illustrated chapbook) and a handful of poems - as for the next book...the tentative title is "Time is Not an Arrow" but there is still so much work to be done before our friends at Amazon can assist with distribution.

In the meanwhile, should any reader recognize the book I read when I was twelve, let me know as it remains one of life's mysteries: a pre-teen book about a lovely old man who happens to come from another planet, and the two boys in the neighborhood who discover his secret...

All I can remember is the feel of that book in my hands, the delight of recognizing that I, too, could craft such paragraphs...

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It could have been a great book, January 20, 2008

By 

Miha Ahronovitz "myinnervoice" (Rocklin, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Lessons in Grid Computing: The System Is a Mirror (Hardcover)

Here are a few ideas that I kept after speed reading this book. In Information Technology (IT), we, the people are the resources. Our teams can exist only if we maintain the relationships and we can communicate among ourselves with pleasure and no constraints. If we reuse code and interfaces, we must first use them to begin with. We are the platform to build services and applications, not the operating systems and the chips..

But to say the few things like those described above, the author delves in exuberant verbose. It is obvious he has a deep love for writing fiction. There are too many words and too many stories. In a nutshell, we are told that without humans, IT systems are useless. And as humans, we must read Proust (great French writer - more quoted by others than read -) and Jung (the psychologist who described the collective unconsciousness) to understand ourselves.

This has some value. Many people think mechanical effects solve our life problems: sex techniques bring happiness, or success means selecting MacOS or Linux or Solaris. Computing, like medications prescribed by top doctors, can not bring the happiness via science and technology only.

Why writing 357 pages to say all this? This is a useful book in need to be condensed to about 10% of the book size. In each chapter , a short 5 line summary will be great.

Also the name of Grid Computing is confusing. Sure we believe one day the entire Information Technology will become a grid delivering units of compute power, the same way we have electricity today. We will not need operating systems and CPUs in our offices and homes, we will have a plug in the wall and a meter to read the computing energy used.

The book, that alludes to computing as a service delivery, does not highlight this meaning of grid computing well enough. Once we have a product eliminating the need to know technicalities like system administration, we will understand ourselves as humans first. Then we can make computer applications and services that are as natural as speech in everyday use.

I work in grid computing, I know many engineers who bought this book, thinking this is about a hands-on lesson on Grid Computing programming. They were disappointed, because the title is misleading. It attracted the audience which had totally different expectations. The real audience - IT leadership - might have overlooked the book, because of the title.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Different than what I expected, but far better..., November 17, 2006

By 

Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lessons in Grid Computing: The System Is a Mirror (Hardcover)

When I ordered this book, I expected it to be a compilation or a series of chapters on the promise of grid computing. What I got was something far different, and much more interesting... Lessons in Grid Computing: The System Is a Mirror by Stuart Robbins. Definitely worth reading and pondering (yes, I do ponder once in awhile)...

Contents:
1. The Prime Theorem - Information Systems Mirror the People that Build Them
2. Interfaces - How The Work and What Happens When They Are Broken
3. Relationship Management - We Can No Longer Manage the System as Single Nodes
4. Virtualization - A Natural Stage in the Maturity Cycle of Technologies
5. Orchestration - Finding a Sensible Order Amid Too Many Complications to Count
6. Complexity - Databases, Passwords, Collaboration, Funding, Smashed Atoms, and a Professor
7. Distributed Resources - Two Types of Diffusion - Compute Resources and Human Capital
8. Flash Teams - Analysis of New Organizational Groups from Several Perspectives
9. Network as Narrative Form - Basic Building Blocks Connected to Create Various Structures
10. Identity - Finding the Needle in the Haystack and Giving It a Name
11. Organizational Architecture - How we Organize Ourselves Is as Important as What We Say and Do
12. (Theory of) Resonant Usability - Everything Is Moving to the Presentation Layer, Where Humans Interact
13. Turbulence - Creating Stability in the Face of Chaotic Disruption
14. Libraries - Two Lives, Two Windows, and the Search for Information
15. Abstraction - Lift Yourself Above the Conflicting Details and Look for Similarity
16. Insubordination as an Asset - Why You Must Allow Employees to Disagree with Your Decisions
17. The Consortium - The Multisourced IT Organization and a Software Commons - Our Future
18. The Everysphere - An Example of Synchronous Events between "Unrelated" Objects
19. Q Narratives - Understand the Story and You Will Understand the Business Process
20. Leaving Flatland - To Adjust Somehow after Learning That Your World Has Another Dimension
21. We Are The Platform - Some Final Observations about the System and the Mirror
Index

Normally I wouldn't go into that level of detail on the table of contents, but I felt the single word chapter headings didn't give a flavor for what was going on. Robbins' premise is our information systems are mirrors of the people and groups that build them, and that management styles must change in order to build and facilitate the next level and generation of computing technology. In other words, "the systems won't talk to each other if the people are not talking to each other." All well and good, and you could easily spend 300 pages in a technical or philosophical discussion on that. But Robbins has effectively written a loosely coupled novel that takes these subjects and explores them in the lives, relationships, and companies of a series of individuals. At first, each chapter seems to be a short story on its own. But soon, characters from previous chapters start showing up in the lives of people in later chapters. And in fact, the last two chapters loop around and shed a whole new light on earlier interactions. And not all chapters are even in the same style. There's one chapter (Libraries) that maintains a story on the top half of each page, and a running monologue of the writer critiquing the story on the lower half. Very different, but strangely effective.

The overall theme explored in all the chapters is that a grid system of technology requires a grid system of management and interaction with others. Without that in place, the power of grid computing will not be fully realized. For instance, The Consortium explores a concept where a group of companies arrange to share technology and fill gaps for each other. Company A might have plenty of disk space but not much excess computing power, where company B needs more offsite backup capacity but has CPU cycles to spare. Might they form a grid and become more effective at no additional cost to either party? Simple example, but a powerful concept that can be extended to human resources. My expert DBA can work with your company on adhoc projects in his free cycles while I have access to your security specialist to help me figure out my sticky problems. Neither of us has to hire contractors that take weeks to get hired and up to speed, and we each benefit from the combined expertise.

The book does wander into some (in my opinion) overly philosophical issues at times, but the overall effect of the book with its story format is very compelling. The author does say that "pondering" the chapters is recommended, and I agree. It's a book that will definitely cause to you think about how technology will be structured in the next decade and beyond...

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Practical Technology Meets Fiction, October 5, 2006

By 

Tyler Broskow (Santa Cruz, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lessons in Grid Computing: The System Is a Mirror (Hardcover)

Despite my being someone with a non-technical background, I found myself loving this book, on a number of different levels, as it puts into practical and realistic stories the many complex theories, applications, and fundamental truths that are at the core of information technology and those people and organizations that make it tick.

Having met dozens of CIO's and VP's of Development at firms both huge and small, I never fully understood the context within which they existed until now. Stuart is a practical visionary, and I can honestly say "Lessons in Grid Computing" is probably the most enlightening book I've read all year.