The It Skeptic Looks At Cmdb

Essential reading for all decision makers (IT-literate or not) who are presented with an ITIL(r) proposal or asked to oversee or own an ITIL project. It explains, in lay-manager's terms, what ITIL is. It reveals what ITIL is good for, what it is bad at, what to expect. It describes how to ensure an ITIL project succeeds, what to require from the project, and how to measure the results. "Score: 10 out of 10... This is a wonderfully irreverent, but totally authoritative, book... It is a slim manual that seeks to debunk the language and meaning of ITIL and relate it to the practical implementation of IT service management... It's a gem of a book that offers a good perspective on what the ITIL v3 manuals take 5 volumes to cover." (British Computer Society)

This book is for those who work in Information Technology (IT) and for those who have IT done to them. Service Management is all the rage in IT at the moment, hence "ITSM". The leading description of ITSM is ITIL®. This book is not about ITIL. Really. Real ITSM⢠is a tongue-in-cheek satirical look at what the real-life practices might be, as compared to the idealised models in frameworks like ITIL or COBIT or ISO20000 or ... "[My wife] read the introduction and said it was the first IT book that held her interest past page two" Change Manager, postal service"I experienced numerous moments of amusement, humor and outright hilarity, which made reading this book at my desk during work hours a bit difficult." Bob GrinsellFor more on Real ITSM (and more samples from the book!) come to the Real ITSM website.

Service Management is the potent idea that could change your business. This useful little book is a pocket guide on how to operate any enterprise, described from the point of view of the services it delivers. After all, delivery is what success is all about. It describes the basics, in realistic pragmatic terms. And it is brief - we limited ourselves to 50 pages. Whether you are in manufacturing, trades, retail, IT, not-for-profit...; whether you provide service internally to the rest of your organisation or externally to paying customers; whether you work anywhere from a small business to a government department; this book introduces you to service management. It will get you started, get you up and running, and it will set you on the path to the advanced concepts if that is where you need to be.

With Managing IT as a Business you'll get practical advice on how to unleash the full potential of this critical function so that companies can derive maximum benefit. It offers a proven plan for bridging the gap between CEOs and CIOs that has, until now, impeded their ability to work together in order to craft objectives, establish budget guidelines, and develop metrics for measuring IT value and success. In short, with this book as a guide, business leaders will learn how to manage IT as they would any other functional business unit.

Organize your network resources by learning how to design, manage, and maintain Active Directory. Updated to cover Windows Server 2012, the fifth edition of this bestselling book gives you a thorough grounding in Microsoft’s network directory service by explaining concepts in an easy-to-understand, narrative style. You’ll negotiate a maze of technologies for deploying a scalable and reliable AD infrastructure, with new chapters on management tools, searching the AD database, authentication and security protocols, and Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). This book provides real-world scenarios that let you apply what you’ve learned—ideal whether you’re a network administrator for a small business or a multinational enterprise. Upgrade Active Directory to Windows Server 2012 Learn the fundamentals, including how AD stores objects Use the AD Administrative Center and other management tools Learn to administer AD with Windows PowerShell Search and gather AD data, using the LDAP query syntax Understand how Group Policy functions Design a new Active Directory forest Examine the Kerberos security protocol Get a detailed look at the AD replication process

The world is in a permanent state of change. We must work in new ways. To change the work we must change how we manage; how we think about management. What got you here won't get you there. There are new ways of managing which are changing business, government, and not-for-profit organisations, big and small. This isn't about leaders, it's about managers. It's not about mystical mind methods, it's about principles to work by. It's about agility, the agile Manager. This book starts your journey. The book has four sections: 1. A set of principles which you as an agile manager must get your head around in order to function in the new world. 2. A set of management practices which follow from those principles. 3. A set of agile work practices that you need to understand and support. 4. Guidance on the journey to new ways of working. . . . Agile is a way of thinking about work. Agile is a thing now, it has become a noun as well as an adjective. Agile thinking is impacting Information Technology, enterprises, government, and society. It may have started in IT but now it is transforming work everywhere, and even how we think. Its impact is far-reaching enough to talk of it as a renaissance in thinking, a refresh or step change that comes only once or twice a century. This is not an exaggeration. . . . It is not just Agile, there is a suite of new ideas transforming work. They all aim for "better value sooner, safer, happier". We simply call them the New Ways of Working, NWoW. This book is about the impact of these new ways on management in the modern enterprise. . . . The new thinking empowers people to be knowledge workers, to design the work and make the decisions. It treats them like they are over 18 and on the same side. Conventional management too often treats people like clerical workers, like plug-compatible wetware, like Human Resources, who can't be trusted, who are evaluated numerically, who are an overhead to be minimised, who need to be told what to do and how to do it. Which is not conducive to satisfaction and mental health. . . . The Agile way is iterative, incremental, experimenting, exploring complex systems. These are displacing the ideas of conventional enterprises: big-bang projects; zero risk; certainty and accuracy; plan once execute perfectly; failure is not an option. Along the way Agile is resurfacing (and standing on the shoulders of) the ideas of Lean, which ironically go back pre-second-world-war; and Agile is drawing on the principles of complex systems and the modern understanding of human behaviour and social constructs. . . . At least as important, though, is New Ways of Managing. Too often, management views the transformation to New Ways as something done to improve the practitioner workforce, not management. This can't be. For an organisation to change, the management must change. This is one of the biggest issues facing organisations moving to agile ways of working. Managers must understand and focus on empowerment, collaboration, agility, and flow. Why focus on management in agile transformation? Because we see it often neglected, and because it is the key. This book is about how to manage in an agile way, not what agile work looks like. Plenty has been written about that. . . . It is our personal offering. We hope you like it and derive value from it. Join our community and tell us how you felt about it.

This book encompasses a systematic exploration of Cybersecurity Data Science (CSDS) as an emerging profession, focusing on current versus idealized practice. This book also analyzes challenges facing the emerging CSDS profession, diagnoses key gaps, and prescribes treatments to facilitate advancement. Grounded in the management of information systems (MIS) discipline, insights derive from literature analysis and interviews with 50 global CSDS practitioners. CSDS as a diagnostic process grounded in the scientific method is emphasized throughout Cybersecurity Data Science (CSDS) is a rapidly evolving discipline which applies data science methods to cybersecurity challenges. CSDS reflects the rising interest in applying data-focused statistical, analytical, and machine learning-driven methods to address growing security gaps. This book offers a systematic assessment of the developing domain. Advocacy is provided to strengthen professional rigor and best practices in the emerging CSDS profession. This book will be of interest to a range of professionals associated with cybersecurity and data science, spanning practitioner, commercial, public sector, and academic domains. Best practices framed will be of interest to CSDS practitioners, security professionals, risk management stewards, and institutional stakeholders. Organizational and industry perspectives will be of interest to cybersecurity analysts, managers, planners, strategists, and regulators. Research professionals and academics are presented with a systematic analysis of the CSDS field, including an overview of the state of the art, a structured evaluation of key challenges, recommended best practices, and an extensive bibliography.