IT Organization – Preface

Building a Worldclass Infrastructure

First edition; 188 pages
ISBN: 0-13-022298-4
( by: Harris Kern , Stuart D. Galup and Guy Nemiro )

Preface

Structure, Not Technology

This book brings an urgent message for any Information Technology professional who is responsible for planning, implementing, managing, and supporting client/server (or networked) computing environments. If you want to survive in the networked, client/server world, you must stop, analyze, reorganize and prioritize your infrastructure now.

We spent two years analyzing 40, cross industry Fortune 1000 companies. We were engaged to assist IT organizations in their quest for reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) with client/server environments. This book is based on these case studies.

We found that organizations everywhere have serious latent infrastructure issues. Too often IT managers deal only with the symptoms of their problems by blaming technology, the complexity, or the architecture of client/server environments. The fact is that all of these companies have infrastructure issues that inhibit their ability to have RAS in client/server environments.

All of the companies we analyzed are committed to client/server computing and the transformation to the new paradigm (i.e., any data, anywhere, anytime) which is becoming more prevalent every minute in Internet time. IT organizations must get their acts together to support their business requirements, but the terrifying fact is that IT organizations aren’t prepared for the onslaught of the networked world because of the organizational problems we highlight.

The first section highlights the issues and problems of networked computing we found in our travels around the world. This section highlights what not to do.

The second section tells you how to look at the past for answers to the problems in today’s environments. This section also shows you how to build that elusive world-class infrastructure.

The third section deals with how to structure your IT organization for the twenty-first century and how to give it a competitive advantage in the “dot comming” world.

And last, but so very important, are the questions we are asked most frequently by IT professionals during our travels.

This book is different than any other book we’ve written and any other books in the marketplace on IT organization structures because of the 40 case studies. This book is about the non-technical issues that IT organizations need to address to succeed in a client/server environment. This book is about basics-how to structure an organization so that it works. Through case studies and recommendations, we’ll show you how to set up procedures, policies, and metrics to make sure the organization is effective.

			IT Automation The Quest for “Lights Out”: Data center automation in distributed environments.
			CIO Wisdom Best Practices from Silicon Valley’s Leading IT Experts
			IT Services Costs, Metrics, Benchmarking, and Marketing: Delighting IT customers: your real-world, start-to-finish guide
			CIO Wisdom II More Best Practices from Leading IT Experts
			IT Architecture Toolkit Less theoretical, more practical approach to developing and implementing enterprise architecture.
			IT People Doing More with Less. Best practices for managing the people within the IT organization.
			Data Warehousing Architecture and Implementation: A start-to-finish process for deploying successful data warehouses
			Building Professional Services The Sirens’ Song: A comprehensive guide to creating a professional services organization
			IT Problem Management The complete “best practices” guide to IT problem resolution.
			IT Organization Building a World-Class Infrastructure.
			IT Web Services A Roadmap for the Enterprise: Architectures, platforms, roles, business models, and deployment realities.
			Software Development Building Reliable Systems.
			IT Production Services Building Competitive Advantage: Describes one of the most important functions of an IT infrastructure
			Managing IT as an Investment Partnering for Success: Maximizing the value of technology—and the success of your IT organization.
			High Availability Design, Techniques and Processes: The complete how-to guide for maximizing availability of enterprise systems
			IT Systems Management Design, Implement, and Manage World-Class Infrastructures.
			Technology Strategies Managing technology, value, and change in the new economy.
			Web-Based Infrastructures A 4-D Framework: Maximize the value of your next Web-centered initiative.