IT Organization: Building A Worldclass Infrastructure

2229H-4

Organizing IT for excellence in 21st century distributed environments

Few organizations are achieving their goals for reliability, availability, and serviceability in distributed environments—and the obstacles aren't technical, they're organizational. How does one structure an IT organization to succeed with today's tools and architectures? IT Organization: Building a World-Class Infrastructure delivers realistic, specific answers that draw upon the experiences of more than 40 leading companies. You'll discover how to:

• Design your organization to deliver "any data, anywhere, anytime"
• Combine mainframe-class discipline with 21st century flexibility
• Treat your network like you treat your data center
• Organize around business-critical support functions instead of trendy technologies
• Establish standards without imposing rigidity -- and achieve discipline without bureaucracy
• Overcome the myths that prevent IT organizations from succeeding

Harris Kern and his colleagues have built a worldwide reputation for evaluating IT organizations and identifying solutions -- fast. This concise, to-the-point book will help you do the same. Here are the right questions to ask, specific "people and process" techniques that work, sample SLAs and internal support agreements -- everything you need to make change happen, now!

Related Articles

Aligning IT to the Business: Managing Customer Expectations

Building a World Class IT Infrastructure

Managing the Internet Business Model

Principles of Organizational Design

Production Control = Infrastructure QA

Satisfying the King (Otherwise Known as the IT Customer)

Software: Packaged or Build

The Enterprise Infrastructure Services Organization

Web Services Part 1: Existing Problems

Web Services Part 2: Current Technologies

Web Services Part 3: What Are Web Services?

Why You Need the Production Control Function

Sample Chapter(s)

Click here for a sample chapter for this book: 0130222984.pdf

Preface

Preface

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.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction.