System administrators as broker technicians

Velasquez, Nicole Forsgren; Weisband, Suzanne P.

doi:10.1145/1641587.1641588

Cited by 13 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Their entire focus is on the technical aspects of work, e.g., providing technical information for sysadmins. However, often this information is difficult to be contextualized for a particular customer and its specificities [19]. Because of this lack of support, sysadmins must rely on other people as sources of information.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Information needs of system administrators in information technology service factories

Souza

Pinhanez

Cavalcante

2011

Proceedings of the 5th ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology

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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.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Only recently researchers have started to pay attention to the work of system administrators in the context of service factories [2,19]. Examples of previous work include the study by Haber and colleagues [3] and Botta and colleagues [4] that argue for the collaborative nature of sysadmins' work.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information needs of system administrators in information technology service factories

Souza

Pinhanez

Cavalcante

2011

Proceedings of the 5th ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology

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“…In fact, users may choose to explicitly source no knowledge from the EKR or to source knowledge from external sources. Sysadmins in particular identify with their occupational communities more than they do with their employer, which may lead them to seek knowledge from outside of their organization [31].…”

Section: Knowledge Sourcingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adoption of an Electronic Knowledge Repository: A Feature-Based Approach

Velasquez

Sabherwal

Durcikova

2011

2011 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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Many organizations dedicate money and time to implement electronic knowledge repositories (EKRs).To better implement these systems and motivate users to contribute knowledge, we must better understand how different types of users actually employ an EKR. While a simplistic view might consider an individual's level of EKR usage as high, medium, or low, a richer, feature-based approach allows us a more developed understanding of EKR usage. To achieve this objective, this paper develops an empirical taxonomy of EKR adoption profiles when other knowledge sources are available through surveys of 108 system administrators at a Fortune 500 Company. The three EKR user profilesenthusiastic knowledge seeker, thoughtful knowledge provider, and reluctant non-adopter -are distinct in terms of knowledge sourcing behaviors and context.

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“…Administrators are the network's back-up system and its troubleshooters [32]. As part of their responsibilities, they handle the unanticipated and/or unplanned events in the network [2], and the tasks too complex to automate but needed to maintain the continuous operation of the network.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Administrators collect data from a variety of sources (e.g., [8]) and use a variety of tools to derive the required data [32], [1], [18], and it is not uncommon for administrators to build their own tools where none exist [1]. But these tools are predominantly fact/data gatherers built to solve one problem/task in isolation and are designed for one administrator to interact with at a time [1].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Work Domain Analysis for network management revisited: Infrastructure, teams and situation awareness

Paterson

2014

2014 IEEE International Inter-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA

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In this paper preliminary findings are presented from applying Work Domain Analysis (WDA) [33], [23], the first phase of the Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) framework [33], [23] to the network management domain for the purpose of investigating situation awareness in a network administration team. Our findings suggest that several different strategies are needed to model the problem in different ways.

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System administrators as broker technicians

Cited by 13 publications

References 21 publications

Information needs of system administrators in information technology service factories

Information needs of system administrators in information technology service factories

Adoption of an Electronic Knowledge Repository: A Feature-Based Approach

Work Domain Analysis for network management revisited: Infrastructure, teams and situation awareness

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