Customer Reviews

IT Organization: Building A Worldclass Infrastructure

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

 

 

I had heard good things about this book from both colleagues and clients. I finally got a copy recently as a reference for peer reviewing an assessment of a proposed IT organizational design for a large Middle East oil company. This was one of the references I used to verify and validate the assessment findings and recommendations. Here are the strengths and weaknesses of the book as I see them:

* Strengths: There is a wealth of great ideas. I especially like the way the authors group system administration and DBA functions, and I fully concur with a previous reviewer that this is an excellent practice. I also like the way the authors never lose sight of the fact that IT needs to be organized in both a cost-effective manner and structured to provide the best possible service in the form of reliability, availability and support. In fact I compiled a large list of excellent ideas and best practices after combing through this book.

* Weaknesses: It's unanimous - the table of contents bears no relationship to the actual contents of this book. I blame the publisher for that, not the authors. Not that the authors are blameless. I found no coherent structure to the book. The list of gems I compiled from this book was the result of an arduous process because they are scattered throughout in seemingly random order. However, the biggest flaw I found is that the authors seem to be presenting a point of view based on their experience, with no real traceability to the rich body of knowledge that has been developed. For example the IT Service Management Forum (ITSMF), which is an international professional organization devoted to promoting standards and best practices in IT service management has a model to which an IT organizational structure can be benchmarked. The ITSMF uses standards and methods from the IT Infrastructure Library Series, which were developed by the British Government (and are available from Amazon), which align service and application delivery and support to IT organization. This "standard" was not mentioned once in the book, which I consider to be a glaring omission.

* On Balance: This book has flaws, some small and some large. It also has some excellent ideas and certainly contains a wealth of best practices. Despite the weaknesses I mentioned, the organizational structure proposed by the authors is better than what I have seen in practice at numerous clients, some of which are very large corporations. Also, this book does step up to the plate and address organizational structure head-on. Most of the books I have read are more focused on IT value to the business. While these are important, they all seem to sidestep any recommendations for how an IT organization should be structured. So, this book has a lot of value in that respect.

* Recommendation: Read this book for the ideas. However, do not read it in a vacuum. Compare and contrast the recommendations made with the large body of knowledge on service management and the associated recommendations for organizing IT to support the models that have been internationally adopted.

The book has some publishing flaws. The index does not refer to any thing in the book - look up an item, go to the referenced page and try to find anything evenly remotely close to the index item - you can't.

However, the general information is OK. I have been in the consulting industry for sometime. This is the general approach that is standard for IT consultants. However, there are many more issues regarding web infrastructure that are missing - critical issues that are not even addressed or mentioned. Technical issues such as the real metrics and general structure for RAS and very high concurrency systems, or the differences between OLTP and DSS or Business Intelligence are not even hinted at.

It would be more helpful to the new IT manager if there were case studies and some concrete examples and measures.

If you are brand new to IT, then this book is helpful. But for a real professional - I'm not really sure.

I see this text as more beginners guide to IT than as something truely usefull for the seasoned professional.

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 covers.

Although filled with interesting and even good ideas, this bookultimately disappoints.

For example, Chapter 9 argues that the"Enterprise Services" organization "represents the support and development organization of the future". Separating mission-critical (7x24) and non-mission critical (9x5) support is a key requirement. How does "Enterprise Systems" implement that requirement?

1. The Technical Support division provides 7x24 DBA and system admin services for mission critical systems. So far, so good.

2. Non-mission crtical systems are supported by... by... Gosh, there doesn't seems to be anyone in Enterprise Services supporting non-mission critical systems. So who supports development, pre-production, and "business- critical" systems?

3. Maybe Enterprise Systems only does mission critical systems...

4. But that would suggest the Network team is 7x24 also, but no mention is made of 7x24 network support.

5. And Enterprise Systems includes a 9x5 Client Services group - that doesn't sound mission critical, either.

6. And why the "Project Management" and "Cross-Functional Teams" sections? What do they have to do with the Enterprise Services organization?

7. What does the "Global Technologies" division do - it's on the Enterprise Systems org chart but not discussed. Oh, that's right, it's in a single paragraph buried back in the middle of chapter 4 - how could I have forgotten...

Now I understand! Like a movie preview, there's just enough information to get you interested in seeing the movie. THAT must be why the authors suggest you "please read our [other four] book[s]" a total of 20 times in 124 pages (the author's count, found in the index). This book just whets your appetite for those other books! Those other books must have all the rest of the details...

Or maybe it's to sell their services:

o "The first step [in building a worldclass infrastructure] is information gathering that is our one- to two-day assessment process. An outside consultant (see Appendix A [sic] for the program) should perform this the appraisal" p. 85).END

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.