Rating: 
Summary: How to sell your services 101!
Review: The text has many flaws. One of the most glaring is that the index has nothing to do with the book. You cannot find anything that the index indexes.The general principles are OK - but have been around in IT professionalism for about the 33 years that I have been in the business. There are no case studies, recommendations for remediation, no base technologies or deployment issues noted, and no mention of the educational leap that most professi0nals are finding themselves confronted with today in a distributed environment. There are incosistencies in the recommended approach, no sample task lists, questions for the internal people ... etc. These guide lines can be found at the websites of IBM, DEC, Amdahl, Hitachi, Data General, KPMG, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and Ernst-Young.
Rating: 
Summary: Flawed, but some excellent concepts make it worthwhile
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Flawed, but some excellent concepts make it worthwhile
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Really, really bad
Review: This book is awful. There were at LEAST 15 comments like: "for more information on this topic, please read our book ....." The fact is, I was reading THIS book, and the information was not there. The length of the book, apart from the appendix, is only 120 pages, and there are so many graphs and charts in here, that there isn't any real meat to this book. Maybe the authors knew what they were doing by telling us to go read their other books.
Rating: 
Summary: Intro to the series
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Intro to the series
Review: 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.
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