book review

A review of Governance of IT

Here is an important book: Governance of IT, by Alison Holt. Everyone in any role of authority in IT should read it, and anyone else would benefit from a better understanding of governance as well - it is a horrendously misunderstood and misused term.

Better still, everyone in executive management or governance of any organisation should read it. Well I can dream.

Book review: the Phoenix Project

The Phoenix Project is a novel about IT management. Writing a fictional account is a powerful effective way to get the message across, used by others such as Ely Goldratt with The Goal. It is written by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford, the team who gave us Visible Ops, one of the more talked-about books in IT (I really must review that one day). I liked the book; you should read it, but I have a few big problems with it. The Phoenix Project is an important-enough book to warrant taking the time to discuss what those problems are.

Book review: Defining IT Success Through The Service Catalog, and some other catalogue books

I like Defining IT Success Through The Service Catalog. I use it.

A Brief Review of Creating and Driving Service Excellence

Creating and Driving Service Excellence looks like a handy tool for selling ITSM to the bosses.

Muddled Management of Portfolios

Like most people these days I seldom truly read a book - properly. I read in fits and starts, I speed read sections and skip others entirely. So perhaps I missed something, but I had hoped the new book Management of Portfolios™ would be about portfolios in general not project portfolios in particular. It's not. it's all about projects. How can one OGC product so utterly disregard another?

A review of The CMDB Imperative

I didn't read The CMDB Imperative (that's the second time I started a review with that idea). I didn't read it because (a) you've got to be pretty keen on CMDBs to stick with the dry content (although the authors do as good as anyone could to make it palatable) and (b) because I fundamentally disagree with it, which dragged me down after a while. I got to about page 180 and then...

The IT Skeptic looks at ITIL Lite

The IT Skeptic was pretty scathing of Malcolm Fry's first ITIL V3 Complementary Publication, Building an ITIL-Based Service Management Department. Personally I wouldn't buy it (again). Malcolm's second "official" V3 book ITIL Lite is different. It is worth buying just for Chapter 2: "a simple but effective approach to ITIL process engineering". I got several great ideas from it and the overall methodology is a good one. But ITIL Lite has several fundamental assumptions that many will disagree with. These assumptions will mislead an already confused user community, and I think they spoil the rest of the book.

Review of Building an ITIL-Based Service Management Department

Some time ago I purchased the official OGC ITIL book Building an ITIL-Based Service Management Department but I have not got around to reviewing it until now. Part of my slowness stems from my disappointment with the book, and partly I was holding off to see what others thought. I hold Malcolm Fry in high regard: I expected much better and I wondered if maybe I had missed something. Apparently not.

Not a review of Cult of the Amateur

This post has been podcast.
Months ago I set out to read Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen, Doubleday 2007. I want to review this book but I can't because it makes me so angry I can't finish it. I fling it across the room and leave it for weeks before I try again. So far I've made to page 19. I can't recall when I last read such an irrationally emotive, ill-informed, unbalanced diatribe. I even include here my own writings. What makes it worse is that my own opinions are not that far from the author's - I should be a cheerleader. But he just talks crap.

The IT Skeptic reviews ITIL V3 book "Service Strategy"

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[Updated: My review of ITIL V3 "Service Strategy" is no longer available at the original website so I am reposting it here.] If V2 taught us how to walk, V3 teaches us to run. Trouble is, many organizations are still sitting down.

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