Lessons in Grid Computing: The System Is a Mirror - Hardcover

Robbins, Stuart

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471790109 ISBN 13: 9780471790105

Verlag: John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

"You should not overlook the potential genius in this concept."
--Geoffrey Moore, consultant and author, Dealing with Darwin

"Since he first identified 'information systems as mirrors of the people who build them' for me, I have seen it operate in many ways. It is a fascinating idea, and a completely new way of thinking about technology."
--Sean Moriarty, Chief Operating Officer, Ticketmaster

"This book makes for compelling reading--it's easy to become immersed in the stories, and the insights gradually grow in the reader's mind as they take root in the character's minds. This is quite a useful work. The ideas presented here could be quickly put to practical use in any organization."
--Mohamed Muhsin, VP and CIO, The World Bank

A breakthrough exploration of information systems as mirrors of the people who build them.

Packed with truer-than-life stories, stimulating characters, and unique IT analysis, Lessons in Grid Computing finally declares:
* Our systems will not "talk to each other" if our people are not talking to each other
* We must transform ourselves to the same degree that we want to transform our systems
* To correct problems in our information systems, we must first address the problems between the people that build and support them

Discover how to adjust your management style to enable the next generation of technologies with the help of Lessons in Grid Computing.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

STUART ROBBINS, a senior management consultant and lecturer, is the founder and Executive Director of The CIO Collective, a not-for-profit association of technology executives providing strategic guidance to emerging institutions and initiatives, including Yahoo!, Macromedia, The World Bank, the Federal CIO Council, and numerous venture capital firms on the west coast. Stuart has served on advisory boards for Encentuate, Netscaler/Citrix, DataArt, Morgan Stanley, and Ziff Davis Media, and held senior IT management positions at Cadence Design Systems, Synopsys, Inc., EMC Documentum, and Jamcracker where he served as the company's first CIO. He is a contributing author to CIO Wisdom: Best Practices from Silicon Valley's Leading IT Experts and serves on the editorial board for ISM Journal, a quarterly IT magazine in which he also writes a column entitled "Sustainable Knowledge." He holds a master's degree in fine arts from Warren Wilson College and lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, his son Max, three cats, and a golden retriever.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Blending a compelling narrative, engaging short stories, and razor sharp observations, Lessons in Grid Computing: The System Is a Mirror draws on author Stuart Robbins's gift for storytelling and IT analysis to provide a groundbreaking approach to grid management theory. This breakthrough and inventive guide capably reveals his belief that IT systems are mirrors, reflecting the dynamics and dysfunction of the people who design, build, and manage our technology ecosystems.

The greatest handicap observed in any technical organization, large or small, is the nearly universal inability of technologists to adequately explain themselves?to their executives, to their customers, even to their spouses. Emphasizing the management of not only the systems but the relationships between the people who build and support them, Lessons in Grid Computing bridges this communication gap by following believable protagonists on fictional, yet real-world, struggles to overcome the many technical and management challenges faced in business today.

By addressing how computer and social systems are conceptually intertwined, Robbins identifies the primary elements of grid computing in an accessible manner that allows readers to easily understand them and apply them within their own organizations and projects.

Each provocative IT theme?including layoffs, insubordination, virtualization, organizational architecture, complexity/simplicity, venture financing, identity, intellectual property, orchestration, innovation and more?is vividly embedded in a story that makes IT management come to life. Written for chief information officers, C-level executives, and IT professionals at every level of the industry, Lessons in Grid Computing demonstrates how we must change our management behavior when we adopt new technologies. Written for a wider audience, these stories provide an insider's glimpse of the daily lives of characters who happen to populate the world of IT, characters with frailties and insights, successes and tragedies, good days and days when they would rather have stayed in bed.

The greatest handicap observed in any technical organization, large or small, is the nearly universal inability of technologists to adequately explain themselves?to their executives, to their customers, even to their spouses. Emphasizing the management of not only the systems but the relationships between the people who build and support them, Lessons in Grid Computing bridges this communication gap by following believable protagonists on fictional, yet real-world, struggles to overcome the many technical and management challenges faced in business today.

By addressing how computer and social systems are conceptually intertwined, Robbins identifies the primary elements of grid computing in an accessible manner that allows readers to easily understand them and apply them within their own organizations and projects.

Each provocative IT theme?including layoffs, insubordination, virtualization, organizational architecture, complexity/simplicity, venture financing, identity, intellectual property, orchestration, innovation and more?is vividly embedded in a story that makes IT management come to life. Written for chief information officers, C-level executives, and IT professionals at every level of the industry, Lessons in Grid Computing demonstrates how we must change our management behavior when we adopt new technologies. Written for a wider audience, these stories provide an insider's glimpse of the daily lives of characters who happen to populate the world of IT, characters with frailties and insights, successes and tragedies, good days and days when they would rather have stayed in bed.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Lessons in Grid Computing

The System Is a MirrorBy Stuart Robbins

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2006 Stuart Robbins
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-471-79010-5

Chapter One

THE PRIME THEOREM

These stories are distributed objects on a local network, the perimeter of which is bound by the covers of this book.

Each story/object represents a fundamental concept underlying Grid Management Theory, formulated over two decades of my profession in information technology (IT) and based on a core set of central principles. Rather than presenting each concept in the traditional mode of other management books, or in the accepted academic format of research papers with statistics and an annotated bibliography, I have chosen a narrative format for two important reasons:

1. The central premise of Grid Management Theory is that the people who design, build, and manage our technology ecosystems are an essential component of these systems. Subsequently, concentration on their life stories can provide a more inclusive portrayal of these central principles.

In this case, fiction offers a more honest picture.

2. The greatest handicap observed in any technical organization, large or small, corporate or private, is the nearly universal inability of technologists to explain themselves adequately-to their executives, their customers, and their spouses.

These stories provide a bridge.

Each concept is embedded in a story with believable characters struggling with real IT issues, an accessible format that will hopefully engender more fruitful discussions within and beyond our organizations than those normally provoked by academic treatises or business guru-speak. One thoughtful extension of this strategy might be an IT Director sharing a copy of Chapter 3 on Virtualization with her sales/marketing counterparts, to help them understand the impact of this issue on the Director's organization, their morale, and their place in history.

The Internet, viewed from this perspective, is a latticed system of relationships-among libraries, information objects, servers, and, as you will see in the course of these stories, the users of this system. The best example is the lesson I learned more than a decade ago: hypertext is nonhierarchical, and therefore, to be successfully implemented, it requires nonhierarchical (matrix-managed) teams. To manage Internet-based projects properly (software development, eCommerce, publication), one must manage the series of relationships among the people who build and support those projects.

The central proposition of this book is a theme I've observed at every level of the corporation and at every level of our IT architecture: information systems mirror the people who build them. Each story in this collection is based on this central theorem and a set of corollaries, derived from the broader discipline of systems theory as it applies to information systems.

The Prime Theorem is this:

We mirror ourselves in the systems that we build. Therefore:

Corollary 1. The systems will not "talk to each other" if the people are not "talking to each other."

Corollary 2. The relationships between systems reflect the relationships between the people who build and support them.

Corollary 3. To correct problems in our information systems, we must first address the problems among the people that build them.

Corollary 4. We must transform ourselves to the same degree that we want to transform our systems.

To introduce this collection of short stories, it is important to emphasize that I have observed examples of this theorem everywhere. When I was an IT manager, every company and every project reflected this theme. During my career as a management consultant, I am frequently asked to perform quiet, background audits of distressed projects for the executive team. The expectation, among most of my clients, is that a technical issue is the root of the problem. Invariably, I have discovered that the central issue is nested among the people, not the technology.

Most recently, I was asked to review the Services-Oriented Architecture project successfully implemented by a major worldwide firm. They had written a brilliant exposition of the integrated framework of data, applications, and infrastructure transformed to maintain competitive advantage. Their understanding of this transformative architecture and their execution of its initial stages was impressive, a model for others to follow. However, when I reviewed their documentation, there was not a single reference to the organizational aspects of the project. I asked whether they had considered the possibility that the IT organization would be transformed to the same degree that they had transformed their environment. One of the directors turned to me and said, "If someone had posed that question two years ago, it would have saved us many months of organizational confusion."

Like an optical illusion in a child's gaze, patterns are subtle and easily overlooked until a parent suggests that the child look for the long tail of a squirrel. The child calls out with delight, "I see it!" and after that moment of recognition, she can never again look at the diagram without first seeing the once-hidden shapes, now in the foreground of her attention, as if the original image of intersections and arcs has become transparent.

Our mirrored image is similarly hidden in the complex constructions of technology we have created during the past two decades. Unlike the optical illusion, there has been less intentional obfuscation, yet the technology is nonetheless a diagram of intersections, arcs, wires, boxes, and closets filled with more intersections, boxes, and wires. We see only what we have been taught to see, disregarding our own reflection until the author suggests that we look for the human element.

Almost immediately, like children at that moment of clarity, changing forever our view of the design, someone says "I see it!" and their comprehension of technology is altered. The original impression, the purely physical realm of circuit boards, coaxial cables, wireless relay junctions, and dumb terminals becomes transparent.

It has been ten years since I first postulated a relationship between information systems and the "people systems" that build and maintain them, in an editorial and subsequent conference paper for the Association of Computing Machinery. Back in 1995, it was only a theory, founded on my understanding of the writings of Gregory Bateson and, later, the mentorship of Professor Sandra Braman. In the past ten years, in every company and in every role, I have witnessed its proof. I no longer consider it merely an interesting theory to be talked about briefly in hallways. It is a fundamental concept that underlies everything we do (and cannot do) in IT.

As we move toward Grid Computing and the many related technologies composing the "new IT," this principle becomes more than theoretically intriguing. It must be an integral part of your strategic roadmap. For success on the Grid, we must transform ourselves and our organizations to the same degree that we seek to transform our architectures.

As corporations begin to connect their systems, and as their company's networks are connected to other networks, adding to an immense and complex architecture that becomes difficult for executives to understand and impossible for their staff to explain to them in a language the executives can comprehend, an entirely new and daunting challenge presents itself. By analogy, water does not flow easily between the new pipes and the old pipes. In this case, the water is information, and as our companies increasingly become dependent on a transfer of information among customers, partners, vendors, and consultants, the myriad layers of software, servers, routers, repositories, databases, access points, devices, and the ever-increasing volume of information itself, is now a barrier.

In many cases, you simply can't get there from here.

The IT industry finds itself at yet another evolutionary cycle, with new technologies emerging with features and functions that were impossible only five years before. Such trends-web services, open source, blade technology, commodity search, distributed computing, and the Grid-offer substantial benefits. However, we find it difficult to describe those benefits to our executives, who are inclined to say, "Just make it happen," without an appreciation of cost, complication, or risk.

We need a new way of communicating with our executive teams and with the many other significant people who can influence our lives as IT practitioners. I have elected to tell stories, stories that reflect the essential principles we must incorporate into our world of IT in the coming decade. I wanted to utilize a preexisting Application Programming Interface (API): the narrative format, which has already been used successfully to convey important business issues by many others, from Eliyahu Goldratt's The Goal to Stephen Denning's efforts at The World Bank and Debra Stouffer's strategic use of storytelling at DigitalNet.

We need a new politics in our industry, with a new vocabulary, one that provides a bridge between companies, between individuals, and between executives and their technologists.

Of course, I recognize the double-edged challenge inherent in this task: I might oversimplify complex themes and alienate the technology professionals to whom the book is dedicated, or I might make the tinsel of computers too significant and thus bore those who delight in narrative, and well-crafted sentences.

Between these two polar challenges (the Scylla and Charybdis of this book) I envision a middle ground, the place where technology is embedded in our existence, where everything is connected to everything and the place where work involving binary logic is like any other work that we do each day.

We are what we build: it is a unified theory that acts prismatically, in which the elegance of heightened prose and the artfulness of "if-then" statements cast similar colors through our stained glass windows as we come home each day.

Short stories are distributed objects, and they are situated in this book like services on a local area network, bound by the perimeter of its covers.

The central theories underlying well-constructed narratives mirror the practices we must put into place to implement Grid Computing successfully and to benefit from it. That mirror also offers us an opportunity to learn something about ourselves.

We can no longer focus solely on the relationships between elements in a database or servers in a data center; rather, we must also consider and manage the relationships between the people that build and support them. We, who live in the IT world, are also nodes on the network, each adding value as every phone added value to the growth of the telecommunications industry, as every web site added value to the growth of the Internet, and we will harvest the true value of this networked world only when we begin to manage the people and the technology in a systemic (unified) way.

This book presents several ways to do just that.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Lessons in Grid Computingby Stuart Robbins Copyright © 2006 by Stuart Robbins. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: John Wiley & Sons Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0471790109
• ISBN 13: 9780471790105
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar