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.

Title	Authors	Venue	Comments
Collaboration in system administration Eben M. Haber, Eser Kandogan, Paul P. Maglio Communications of the 2011		Communications of the ACM	Discusses the importance of collaboration in system administration work.
On the Roles of Policies in Computer Systems Management	Kandogan, E, P. Maglio, E. Haber, J. Bailey	International Journal of Human Computer Studies, Vol. 69, No. 6, pp 351-361	Discusses the use of policies in IT system administration, and considers the possibility of policy-based automation.
Scripting practices in complex systems management	Scripting practices in complex systems management	Proceedings of the Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for the Management of Information Technology, 2009	Discusses the importance of scripting in system administration work, and describes scripting practices amoung sysadmins.
Studying Reactive, Risky, Complex, Long-Spanning, and Collaborative Work: The Case of IT Service Delivery	E Kandogan, E M Haber, J H Bailey, P P Maglio	Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 2009	Describes field study and survey methods used for studying system administrators.
Policy-based IT automation: the role of human judgment	E Kandogan, J Bailey, P P Maglio, E Haber	Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology, 2008	Policy-based automation is one approach to improving IT administration, this paper describes actual policy use in system administration.
System administrator teamwork: evidence from the SAGE salary survey Eben M. Haber CHiMiT '08 Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information 2008	Haber, Eben	Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology, 2008	A poster analyzing new questions in the SAGE annual salary survey on the topic of collaboration.
"Distributed Cognition and Joint Activity in Computer-System Administration."	Maglio, Paul P, Eser Kandogan, and Eben Haber	Resources, co-evolution, and artifacts: Theory in CSCW.  Ed. M.S. Ackerman, C. Halverson, T. Erickson, and W. A. Kellogg.  Kluwer CSCW Series, 2007	Investigates problem-solving among system administrators.
"Security Administrators: A Breed Apart."	Haber, Eben, and Eser Kandogan	SOUPS 2007 Workshop on Usable IT Security Management.	How are security administrators different from other system administrators, and computer users in general?
"Design Guidelines for System Administration Tools Developed through Ethnographic Field Studies."	Haber, Eben, and John Bailey	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?
"Activity-based management of IT service delivery."	Bailey, John, Eser Kandogan, Eben Haber, Paul P. Maglio	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?
"Security Administrators in the Wild: Ethnographic Studies of Security Administrators."	Haber, Eben and Eser Kandogan	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?
"Security Administration Tools and Practices."	Kandogan, Eser, and Eben M. Haber	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.
"Sensemaking Sysadmins: Lessons from the Field."	Haber, Eben	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.
"Field Studies of Computer System Administrators: Analysis of System Management Tools and Practices."	Barrett, R., Kandogan, E., Maglio, P. P., Haber, E. M., Takayama, L. A., Prabaker, M.	Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work CSCW '04.	Describes system administrator tools and work practices.
"Distributed Cognition Analysis of Attention and Trust in Collaborative Problem Solving."	Maglio, Paul P., Eser Kandogan, and Eben Haber	Proc. Cognitive Science 2003.	Investigates problem-solving among system administrators.

• Koala/CoScripter is a tool for recording and playing back web-based processes, and sharing these scripts with other people:
  
• G Leshed, E M Haber, T Matthews, T Lau, "CoScripter: automating & Sharing How-To Knowledge in the Enterprise", Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2008.
• G Leshed, E Haber, T Lau, A Cypher, GROUP, "CoScripter: Sharing How-To Knowledge in the Enterprise",
  
• Little, Greg, Tessa A. Lau, Allen Cypher, James Lin, Eben M. Haber, Eser Kandogan, "Koala: capture, share, automate, personalize business processes on the web." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems CHI 2007.
  
• A1 is a programming environment intended to help system administrators build small scripts and tools to automate monitoring and other processes:
  
• Haber, Eben, Eser Kandogan, Allen Cypher, Paul P. Maglio, and Rob Barrett, "A1: Spreadsheet-based Scripting for Developing Web Tools." Proc. USENIX LISA 2005.
• Kandogan, Eser, Eben Haber, Rob Barrett, Allen Cypher, and Paul Maglio, "A1: End-User Programming for Web-based System Administration."  Proc. ACM UIST 2005.  
• Here is a 17MB movie that demonstrates A1 in action.