Information needs of system administrators in information technology service factories

ABSTRACT

In this paper we describe the results of an empirical study about the information needs of system administrators. This study is based on an electronic survey with more than 200 systems administrators, or sysadmins, working on incident management in a large scale IT service delivery organization. The survey covered their information needs in both complex and routine situations. The results of the survey described in this paper go beyond previous work on system administrators by presenting a much more complex picture, suggesting that sysadmins make low usage of knowledge management tools; largely adopt personal communication and collaboration tools: and finally, need to gather information about customers from a complex set of stakeholders. The system administrators also indicated in our survey that the most useful sources of information in handling complex incidents are: (i) the customer; (ii) the customer account team; and (iii) other employees who were experts both in the customer and in particular aspects of the delivery of services. This study indicates that knowledge management in IT service factories is very challenging and possibly should evolve from the often adopted passive model to a dynamic knowledge management style emphasizing both knowledge reusability through information technologies and knowledge sharing through informal discussions among employees.

References

1. Gonzalez, V. M., Galicia, L., & Favela, J. (2008). Understanding and supporting personal activity management by IT service workers. ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology (p. 1). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. doi: 10.1145/1477973.1477976.
2. Barrett, R., Kandogan, E., Maglio, P. P., Haber, E., Takayama, L. A., & Prabaker, M. (2004). Field studies of computer system administrators: analysis of system management tools and practices. Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 388--395).
3. Haber, E. M., Kandogan, E., & Maglio, P. P. (2011). Collaboration in system administration. Communications of the ACM, 54(1), 46. doi: 10.1145/1866739.1866755.
4. Botta, B., Muldner, K., Hawkey, K., Beznosov, K.: Toward understanding distributed cognition in IT security management: the role of cues and norms. Cognition, Technology & Work 13(2): 121--134 (2011)
5. Kandogan, E., Haber, E. M., Bailey, J. H., & Maglio, P. P. (2009). Collaborative Work: The Case of IT Service Delivery. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction (pp. 504--513).
6. http://www.itlibrary.org/index.php?page=Incident_Managem ent ITIL Incident Management - The ITIL Open Guide.
7. Scott, Richard. ORGANIZATIONS: RATIONAL, NATURAL, AND OPEN SYSTEMS. 5. ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003. 430 p.
8. McCracken, G., The Long Interview. 1988, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
9. Jorgensen, D. L., Participant Observation: A Methodology for Human Studies. 1989, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE publications.
10. Carlile, P. R. A Pragmatic View of Knowledge and Boundaries: Boundary Objects in New Product Development, Organization Science 13 (4) (2002): 442--455.
11. Choi, B., & Lee, H. (2003). An empirical investigation of KM styles and their effect on corporate performance. Information & Management, 40, 403--417.
12. Vargo, S. L., & Lusch, R. F. (2004). Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing. Journal of Marketing, 68(1), 1--17. doi: 10.1509/jmkg.68.1.1.24036.
13. Malone, T. W., Laubacher, R., Dellarocas, C. N., Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence (February 3, 2009). MIT Sloan Research Paper No. 4732-09. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1381502.
14. Vukovic, M. Laredo, J., Rajagopal, S.: Challenges and Experiences in Deploying Enterprise Crowdsourcing Service. International Conference on Web Engineering: 460--467, Vienna, Austria, 2010.
15. Lopez, M., Vukovic, M. Laredo, J.,: PeopleCloud Service for Enterprise Crowdsourcing. IEEE International Conference on Services Computing, 538--545, Miami, FL, USA, 2010.
16. Wild, C., Seber, G. Chance Encounters: A First Course in Data Analysis and Inference, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1999.
17. Ackerman, M., Pipek, V., Wulf, V. Sharing Expertise: Beyond Knowledge Management, MIT Press, 2003.
18. Nardi, B., Whittaker, S., Isaacs, E., Creech, M., Johnson, J., Hainsworth, J. (2002). ContactMap: Integrating Communication and Information Through Visualizing Personal Social Networks. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (CACM). April, 2002.
19. Velasquez, N. F., Weisband, S. P. System administrators as broker technicians. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for the Management of Information Technology (CHiMiT '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2009.
20. Velasquez, N. F., Durcikova, A. Sysadmins and the need for verification information. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2008.
21. Haber, E. M., 2008. System administrator teamwork: evidence from the SAGE salary survey. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2008.
22. Cataldo, M., Wagstrom, P., Herbsleb, J. and Carley, K. (2006). Identification of Coordination Requirements: Implications for the Design of Collaboration and Awareness Tools. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'06), Banff, Alberta, Canada.
23. Costa, J. M. R, Cataldo, M. and de Souza, C. R. B (2011). The Scale and Evolution of Coordination Needs in Large-Scale Distributed Projects: Implications for the Future Generation of Collaborative Tools. in Proceedings of the International Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI'11), Vancouver, Canada
24. Creswell, J. W., Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. Sage Publications Inc., 2003.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Collaborative and social computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • Interaction paradigms

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Management of computing and information systems

      • File systems management

      • System management