Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication
Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication
Communications of the ACM
A survey of system administrator mental models and situation awareness
SIGCPR '01 Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGCPR conference on Computer personnel research
Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems
Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems
The Vision of Autonomic Computing
Computer
System administrators are users, too: designing workspaces for managing internet-scale systems
CHI '03 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Field studies of computer system administrators: analysis of system management tools and practices
CSCW '04 Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Error Messages: What's the Problem?
Queue - System Failures
Trust as an underlying factor of system administrator interface choice
CHI '06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
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
Activity-based management of IT service delivery
Proceedings of the 2007 symposium on Computer human interaction for the management of information technology
Towards understanding IT security professionals and their tools
Proceedings of the 3rd symposium on Usable privacy and security
Representations and requirements: the value of ethnography in system design
Human-Computer Interaction
Computer Human Interaction for the Management of Information Technology
Work practices of system administrators: implications for tool design
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology
Sysadmins and the need for verification information
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology
Usable autonomic computing systems: The system administrators' perspective
Advanced Engineering Informatics
A service delivery platform for server management services
IBM Journal of Research and Development
Transparent collaboration: letting users simulate another user's world
Proceedings of the 4th Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for the Management of Information Technology
Information needs of system administrators in information technology service factories
CHIMIT '11 Proceedings of the 5th ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology
Knowledge and information and needs of system administrators in IT service factories
Proceedings of the 10th Brazilian Symposium on on Human Factors in Computing Systems and the 5th Latin American Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
GROUP workshop proposal: collaboration in managing computer systems
Proceedings of the 17th ACM international conference on Supporting group work
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This research investigates the work practices of system administrators. Using semi-structured interviews and an analysis of existing system administrator literature, we theorize that system administrators act as technical brokers who bridge two communities, the end users they support and their own technical community. We also show that system administrators, like other technical workers, rely on contextual knowledge. This knowledge is largely acquired through practice and less through formal education and certification. Through a discussion of common reactive and proactive system administrator duties, we present system administrators as broker technicians who must mediate between the end users they support and their technical community. We end with a discussion of the changing role of sysadmins as their tools and users get more sophisticated.