Preparing for .NET Enterprise Technologies: A Practical Guide for People, PCs, and Processes Interacting in a .NET World

From the Book: When Addison-Wesley asked us to write this book, we were thrilled. We'd been working in the IT industry for over 20 years. During this time, we participated in a lot of projects, met people from every level of every type of organization, and lived through all sorts of work situations, but each and every one had a single unifying thread: change and change management. This book allowed us to bring together many of the things we have gathered, identified, developed, designed, and put in place during our career. Our goal is that it becomes a guide that can help you to understand change and to transform your organization into one that can live with constant change, whether it is technological or human in nature. Living with constant change is important to all of us who work with computers. In a recent survey, Statistics Canada announced that in 2001, more than 57 percent of working Canadians work with a PC. Of these, more than 80 percent work with a computer every day. This trend is the same in the US and it doesn't stop with the workforce. Computers are becoming even more pervasive in our everyday lives. This world of constant change is the reason for our focus on people, PCs and processes. Knowing, understanding and mastering everything about your organization, its objectives and purpose are essential when implementing IT change if you want to be able to profit from it and especially, help your usersbenefit from it. This book helps you get there. It proposes a unified Enterprise Management Framework for distributed technologies. This framework can help people and organizations make better sense of the IT world. It is presented in two parts. First it helps you identify the need for change in your IT infrastructure. It also identifies specific tools you can use to ease the change process; in fact, manage the change. Second, it helps you prepare for the Enterprise Management Framework and implement it as a comprehensive IT Change Management Strategy. This book is also a planning tool that can help you make the transition to .NET Enterprise Technologies, a world where every element is tied together and every element may impact the others; a world where it is important if not crucial to ensure that every modification you bring to your network does not impact existing processes in a negative manner. Here, IT change is not only constant; it is perpetual because IT components are always on the move. We included more than 100 illustrations that help define the processes we describe. Since many of the processes can appear fairly complex at first, these illustrations help simplify their comprehension. These processes work; each and every one has been implemented in whole or in part in real life situations. Information is power. The more you know, the better your decisions will be. That's why we feel managers and IT professionals, even users, should be aware of the processes we describe. One of our main goals is to bridge the gap between the vision users have of a computer system and the technical approaches IT professionals take to prepare and deliver them. We sincerely hope you find it as rich and rewarding as we have. For us, this book is the culmination of a dream, helping people interact with PCs. Your comments will always be appreciated because they can only help improve the way users around the world interact with computers. The Companion Web Site Several of the items you will find in this book can also be found on our companion Web site: www.Reso-Net.com/EMF. Here you will find several items: All of the forms displayed in this book, especially in the appendixes, are available in Adobe Portable Document (PDF) format. An electronic copy of the book, again in PDF format. Some images appear complex in the book; these are available in JPEG and/or EPS format for you to print in larger format. Finally, additional items will be made available in this Web site to assist you in your change management processes. Enjoy the book!