% fortune -ae paul murphy

The Defenestration Series

I've decided to do an end to end rewrite of all three books in the Defenestration series, serialize them in this blog on Fridays, and ask for your help as reviewers/commentators.

To facilitate this Mr. Editor Person has waived copyright transfers to zdnet for anything beyond the purposes of this blog.

This is a project I've been meaning to get to for two years - but haven't been motivated to do because traditional publishers want guarantees and there's neither much money nor fun in the go it alone route.

Basically what's missing from the publishing route is intelligent feedback - only about 3% of defen buyers registered their copies on my website and most of the comments were either just sucky or concerned with spelling errors. This serialization is, therefore, really a response to the fact that this not the typical behavior of readers here ... :)

There are three books in the series:

1. The Board Member's IT Brief (Brief) is a how to guide for senior managers facing IT decisions. It's about understanding IT responsibilities, about information integrity, about recognizing and avoiding disasters, and about hiring and motivating the right people for the job.

   The concerns addressed may be a bit out of scope for this audience - but we can all stretch a bit, right?

2. Business Information Technology: Foundations, Infrastructure, and Culture (BIT) is a guide to understanding IT people for users, and user managers, who have to interact with us. It's about geek speak and where we come from, what we think we know, and what motivates us.

   Most people who've read the first version of this say it's boring - and I'm sure most of the readers here will agree. The point, however, is that users don't make the same assumptions we do about what we know and why we do things - so a book aimed at educating them has to cover a lot of history and terminology you and I already think we understand.

3. The Unix Guide to Defenestration (Defen) is a how to guide for IT people who want to do the job right. It's about using Unix, about building communities, and about measuring and selling success.

   Is it a guide to Sun Ray? No, but it's certainly a guide to using technologies like smart displays and Unix to get the job done - preferably without damaging your IT career in the process.

We'll start with Brief next week.