Archive for the 'System Administration' Category
November 29th, 2005 by Mark Ramm
TPoSaNA is great!
If you manage computer systems, or the people who manage the people who manage computer systems, you should buy and read this book!
Oh, the full title is The Practice of System and network Administration, and it is highly technical without ever delving into the specifics any specific vendor or technological solution. A lot of things in this book will feel intuitively obvious to the experienced system administrator, but I know I couldn’t have articulated them all very easily without reading the book.
Not only that, the book is well written, and includes enough interesting stories of real life system administration to assure that you will probably laugh out loud at least a couple of times when reading it.
If you manage a large number of systems, or critical servers, this book has information that will make your life better. Buy it, read it, be more successful at work, and have more fun. You’ll learn ways to set up your network so you don’t have to worry about it while you are on vacation — and you’ll learn ways to have more fun at work. Heck, there’s even a chapter called “Being Happy.”
November 14th, 2005 by Mark Ramm
Gerald Weinberg wrote The Psychology of Computer Programming almost 30 years ago, and it has made Software Development better by focusing on the people who do it well and how they work.
But to my knowledge nobody has written anything even remotely like it in the field of System Administration. And it is too bad because Jerry’s work helped lead the way toward programming languages designed for human beings, not machines.
Can somebody write this book soon?
We need to better understand what makes SysAdmin’s tick, and how the great ones solve complex problems quickly under pressure. The more we know about the best at our profession and what particular talents drive them, the more we’ll be able to move our profession forward.
But there seems to be no community of interest around this subject, and unless that happens it is going to be hard to find a market for a book like this.
If you this is something you are working on, or even just something that interests you, let me know and I might start a mailing list or something to help us organize and grow this idea.
November 9th, 2005 by Mark Ramm
Here’s a list of some of the books that have resonated particularly well with me. I have learned a lot from each of these books, and I highly recommend them to all sorts of IT Managers, team leaders, and project management professionals.
Books about IT, but not a specific technology:
- Becomming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem Solving Aproach
- Rapid Development
- Code Complete
- The Practice of System and Network Administration
- Peopleware
- The Pragmatic Programmer
Books about Lean and the Toyota Production System
- Lean Software Development
- Lean Thinking
- Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota’s System Is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It
Books about Human Relationships
- Crucial Conversations
- Getting to Yes
- Influence: Science and Practice
Books about organization/time management
- Getting Things Done
- Organizing from the Inside Out
October 16th, 2005 by Mark Ramm
I’m looking for revolutionary improvements in how we do IT Support, not just a few incremental improvement ideas.
What can we do to make our users think, “WOW, I’ve never seen IT Support like that!”?
I think one key is to teach our users to do cool stuff.
When we help people do things that make them smarter and more successful, that is going to make them happy. And some of that positive emotion is going to rub off on us.
How many IT Support groups teach people how to do non-linear video editing, or to sell stuff on e-bay, or make cool looking web pages? How hard would it be to do that?
The other day I took a few min. out of my day and showed one of our users how to hook up to a wireless network at Pannera Bread. She loved it, and has spent the last couple of weekends drinking coffee, and reading e-mail.
For many of us, this connecting to an unencrypted 802.11 network seems easy, but it gave her freedom, and made her feel good about herself. And that’s revolutionary because most of the time, for most of the world, a call to IT Support leaves you feeling frustrated, and stupid.
And that’s no way to treat your customer!
October 12th, 2005 by Mark Ramm
I was at the bookstore last night, and picked up a copy of Purple Cow, by Seth Godin.
The basic premise of the book is that mass marketing as we know it is a dying art form, and the new marketing is going to be a new kind of hyper-word-of-mouth, accelerated by blogs, e-mail, and online social networks. Seth argues that the thing you need to succeed in this new kind of market is remarkable products, like a Purple Cow.
A Purple Cow would be pretty remarkable, wouldn’t it? — at least for a while!
How does this impact me? I don’t do marketing. I don’t build the kind of products that individuals buy. I manage and do software development, along with internal and external support. It is pretty easy to see how Purple Cow thinking can help us better make and market software products.
But how can we create the Purple Cow of IT support?
I don’t have the answer yet, but I know it is a question worth asking.