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.

Data-Driven Analytical Tools for Characterization of Productivity and Service Quality Issues in IT Service Factories

“…We refer to those IT service organizations as IT service factories following the definition of the term proposed in de Souza, Pinhanez, and Cavalcante (2011). The use of the term factory is purposively chosen there, and applicable in our context, to reflect the fact that those organizations borrow a great deal of structural resemblance to traditional manufacturing factories, including some of their known problems (de Souza, Pinhanez, and Cavalcante 2011). IT service factories have been established in many places across the world, but especially in emerging markets such as India, Brazil, and the like.…”

“…Grounded in qualitative studies, Barrett et al (2004) and Haber, Kandogan, and Maglio (2011) have shown that the maintenance activities in IT service systems are complex and require sophisticated collaborative structures, and de Souza, Pinhanez, and Cavalcante (2011) have shown that such activities require many sources of information and knowledge, both explicit and tacit. We have no knowledge of data-driven analytical methods to support people management issues of IT systems such as the one described in this article.…”

“…Information technology (IT) service factories are mass-scale systems set to deliver IT services using factory-like production methods (de Souza, Pinhanez, and Cavalcante 2011). For the last 3 years, we have been systematically studying a particular large IT service factory, we dubbed for confidentiality reasons the Big Service Factory (or simply BSF), analyzing existing process data, conducting interviews, and proposing methods and tools to improve productivity, service quality, and, ultimately, customer satisfaction.…”

Designing an enterprise social tool for cross-boundary communication, coordination, and information sharing

“…In this case, we conducted a survey that is detailed in [13]. For the purposes of this paper, we should mention that we restricted the survey to sysadmins who worked handling tickets.…”

“…Results from our survey, detailed in [13], suggest that the existent tools to store information about the customers are barely used.…”