The Introduction

Reading has always been an important function for learning, (well, at least since then *invention* of reading, and things sped up a lot since then). For example, one used to go to university in order to "read for a degree". Myself, I went to drink for a degree, but the principle even penetrated my increasingly alcohol-damaged brain - you read to learn, to become part of the expanding consciouness of your subject area.

For the modern programmer, there is a lot to read on his or her subject area. Apart from staples such as Fred Brooks, Knuth, and their modern successors, like Steve Mcconnell there is the web 2.0 versions of reading, reddit or joelonsoftware. However the modern reading is beginning to lose me. Or rather it is beginning to bore me, fail to challenge me, and crucially fail to be relevant to me.

I read in order to think, in order for the ideas to stimulate me and make me challenge some of my own assumptions and maybe even a prejudice or two. Great reading changes the way we think, and so can change the world.

However the reading I encounter daily does not make me think - free newspapers full of PR pieces about restaurants and tv shows, Reuters news articles that hardly get changed by the editors o their way to the presses. And online, reading populated by the same views time and again, not adding to my arsenal of thoughts, but trying by dint of repetition to make me agree without actually having a reasoned argument.

So I want something to read that makes me think, and think well, about my area. Being an IT manager.

And as I cannot find one, I'll have to write one.

The problems, hopes and triumphs I face are not uncommon amoungst any decent manager, but in this industry, I am trying to write what I want to read - a book that consolidates all the best practises and technological know how alongside the soft, philosophical side of running a dept.

This book is never going to be entirely "my" own work - I have learnt too much from too many people clever than me to claim it is so, but even then I hope to expand the book into the modern age - it should take user input. But that fails so badly on so many sites, I am reluctant to start it now. Plus I am not hosting this.

So here is Thinking like an IT manager. A book that is in part didactic, in part training manual, in part philisophical treatise. But hopefully a fun read, and something you would want to dip into occassionally.

Who am I ?

I work as an IT manager in a firm in The City. The City is London's Wall Street, but is much closer to poor people. It also has better "greasy spoon" cafes, a concept that America seems to have missed, much to the detriment of the Big Apple.

p.