Lessons in Grid Computing: The System Is a Mirror »

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.

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.

Foreword by Geoffrey Moore.

Foreword by Thornton May.

Acknowledgments.

Chapter 1: The Prime Theorem

Information Systems Mirror the People that Build Them.

Chapter 2: Interfaces

How They Work and What Happens When They Are Broken.

Chapter 3: Relationship Management

We Can No Longer Manage the Systems as Single Nodes.

Chapter 4: Virtualization

A Natural Stage in the Maturity Cycle of Technologies

Chapter 5: Orchestration

Finding a Sensible Order amid too Many Complications to Count.

Chapter 6: Complexity

Databases, Passwords, Collaboration, Funding, Smashed Atoms, and a Professor.

Chapter 7: Distributed Resources

Two Types of Diffusion—Compute Resources and Human Capital.

Chapter 8: Flash Teams

Analysis of New Organizational Groups from Several Perspectives.

Chapter 9: Network as Narrative Form

Basic Building Blocks Connected to Create Various Structures.

Chapter 10: Identity

Finding the Needle in the Haystack and Giving It a Name.

Chapter 11: Organizational Architecture

How We Organize Ourselves Is as Important as What We Say and Do.

Chapter 12: (Theory of) Resonant Usability

Everything Is Moving to the Presentation Layer, Where Humans Interact.

Chapter 13: Turbulence

Creating Stability in the Face of Chaotic Disruption.

Chapter 14: Libraries

Two Lives, Two Windows, and the Search for Information.

Chapter 15: Abstraction

Lift Yourself above the Conflicting Details and Look for Similarity.

Chapter 16: Insubordination as an Asset

Why You Must Allow Employees to Disagree with Your Decisions.

Chapter 17: The Consortium

The Multisourced IT Organization and a Software Commons—Our Future.

Chapter 18: The Everysphere

An Example of Synchronous Events between “Unrelated” Objects.

Chapter 19: Q Narratives

Understand the Story and You Will Understand the Business Process.

Chapter 20: Leaving Flatland

To Adjust Somehow after Learning That Your World Has Another Dimension.

Chapter 21: We Are the Platform

Some Final Observations about the System and the Mirror.

Index.