The Adaptive Enterprise: IT Infrastructure Strategies to Manage Change and Enable Growth (IT Best Practices) Review

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(More customer reviews)The infrastructure management approach that the authors give in this book incorporates practices from systems (and software) engineering, and is a blueprint for success. The objectives are: (1) end-to-end management with no gaps in ownership, (2)cost efficiencies through reuse and component-based strategies, (3)holistic view that looks at business, operational and technology (instead of the common 'technology only' view), and adaptability (an infrastructure that is managed to long range goals, but can be quickly adapted to emerging and immediate business needs).
How the authors meet these objectives is by identifying physical, functional and interface components that make up the infrastructure and integrating them into a service-oriented framework. This is consistent with component-based software engineering, and it is a remarkably good fit to infrastructure management. Moreover, the authors introduce patterns, also borrowed from software and systems engineering disciplines, to map business requirements to design in an efficient manner that promotes reuse. Another advantage of patterns is this approach captures knowledge (something not directly pointed out in the book). If you're not familiar with process patterns the book I recommend for infrastructure professionals is More Process Patterns by Scott Ambler. This is the second of a two book set and it directly addresses patterns that are related to infrastructure (the first book, Process Patterns, is more focused on software engineering).
The two chapters I liked the most are 4, Developing Adaptive Services, and 5, Services Starter Kit. These chapters tie services to infrastructure and go into fine detail about how to integrate services and the underlying technology. I especially like the way the authors use multiple life cycle management for each layer in the infrastructure. Chapters 6 (Processes and Methods) and 7 (Packaging and People) neatly pull together the preceding chapters into a coherent, process-oriented strategy. The single appendix is also valuable because it gives a comprehensive component catalog. This catalog can be used as the basis of the infrastructure blueprint as well as the foundation of an encompassing asset management initiative.

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