Who are System Administrators?
What are their work practices? What tools do they use? The
following papers were informed by ethnographic field studies of system
administrators in the wild.
- Haber, Eben, and Eser Kandogan, "Security
Administrators: A Breed
Apart." To appear in the SOUPS 2007 Workshop on
Usable IT Security Management. How
are security administrators different from other system administrators,
and computer users in general?
- Haber, Eben, and John Bailey, "Design
Guidelines for System
Administration Tools Developed through Ethnographic Field
Studies." Proceedings of the 2007 Symposium on Computer Human
Interaction for the Management of Information Technology, CHIMIT
'07. How can we make tools
for system administrators that better align with their work practices?
- Bailey, John, Eser Kandogan, Eben Haber, Paul P. Maglio, "Activity-based
management of IT service delivery." Proceedings of the 2007
Symposium on Computer Human
Interaction for the Management of Information Technology, CHIMIT
'07. Can tooling better
support the activities involed in IT service delivery?
- Haber, Eben and Eser Kandogan, "Security
Administrators in the
Wild: Ethnographic Studies of Security Administrators."
Presented
at the SIG CHI 2007 Workshop on Security User Studies: Methodologies
and Best Practices. Is
ethnography a reasonable method for studying security administration,
and security practices in general?
- Kandogan, Eser, and Eben M. Haber,
"Security Administration Tools and
Practices." Security and
Usability: Designing Secure Systems that People Can Use.
Ed. Lorrie Faith Cranor and Simson Garfinkel. Sebastapol: O'Reilly
Media, Inc., 2005, pp357-378. A description of security
administration work practices and environment.
- Haber, Eben, "Sensemaking
Sysadmins: Lessons from the Field."
Presented at the Sensemaking Workshop at ACM CHI 2005. System administrators are an excellent
example of sensemaking professionals, though they are often overlooked
as such.
- Barrett, R., Kandogan, E., Maglio, P. P.,
Haber, E. M., Takayama, L.
A., Prabaker, M. "Field Studies of Computer System
Administrators:
Analysis of System Management Tools and Practices." Proceedings of
the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work CSCW
'04. Describes system
administrator tools and work practices.
- Maglio, Paul P, Eser Kandogan,
and Eben Haber, "Distributed
Cognition
and Joint Activity in Computer-System Administration." Resources, co-evolution, and
artifacts: Theory in CSCW. Ed. M.S. Ackerman, C.
Halverson, T. Erickson, and W. A. Kellogg. Kluwer CSCW Series,
2004. Investigates
problem-solving among system administrators.
- Maglio, Paul P., Eser Kandogan, and Eben
Haber, "Distributed Cognition
Analysis of Attention and Trust in Collaborative Problem
Solving." Proc. Cognitive Science 2003. Investigates problem-solving among
system administrators.