IT Systems Management – Preface

Designing, Implementing, and Managing World-Class Infrastructures

First edition; 528 pages
ISBN 0-13-087678-X
( by: Rich Schiesser )

Preface

Few industries have grown as rapidly or as widely as that of information technology (IT). What began as an infant offshoot of the accounting profession a mere 40 years ago has since matured into a prevalent and compelling force in nearly every segment of business, industry, and society in general. IT is the latest, and most significant, of cultural revolutions.

Futurist author Alvin Tofler, in his book on cultural phenomena, The Third Wave, describes three significant movements in American social development. These were the agricultural revolution of the late 1800’s, the industrial revolution of the early 1900’s, and the information revolution of the last two decades of the twentieth century.

Some 30 years ago Tofler correctly forecast many today’s social and technological trends. But even he could not predict the rapid rate of progress that the IT industry would sustain, nor its profound impact on living standards and business practices.

Much has been written about various IT breakthroughs involving chip technology, compiler designs, hardware components, and programming languages. But little has been written about how to manage effectively the environment in which IT entities co-exist and thrive. This environment is commonly called the IT infrastructure. The process of managing the many attributes that contribute to a stable, responsive IT infrastructure is known as systems management.

This book offers a historical perspective of the various disciplines of system management, along with an in-depth technical treatment of each of them. The historical background explains the when and why of each discipline to enable a better understanding of its purpose and evolution. The technical treatment or process discussion of each discipline shows how to implement and manage each one effectively, regardless of the size or type of platform. For the first time, this book addresses systems management as it applies to mainframe data centers, midrange shops, client-server environments, and web-enabled systems alike.

The 12 disciplines of system management are presented in the approximate order in which they became prevalent and integral to an infrastructure’s operation. Obviously this prioritization will vary slightly from enterprise to enterprise, depending on the emphasis of applications running at a particular center.

			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.