For sysadmins, solving problems usually involves collaborating with others. How can we make it more effective?

Abstract

One of our motivations for studying sysadmins is the ever-increasing cost of IT management. Part of this can certainly be attributed to the fact that computers get faster and cheaper every year, and people do not. Yet complexity is also a huge issue-a Web site today is built upon a dramatically more complicated infrastructure than one 15 years ago. With complexity comes specialization in ITmanagement. With around-the-clock operations needed for today's enterprises, coordination is also a must. System administrators need to share knowledge, coordinate their work, communicate system status, develop a common understanding, find and share expertise, and build trust and develop relationships. System administration is inherently collaborative. At first, it is easy to think that George's story shows poor debugging practices or worse, poor skills, but we don't think that's the case. The system was complex, the documentation poor, the error messages unenlightening, and no single person was responsible for all of it. Better error messages or better documentation would certainly help, but that misses the point. There will always be cases that go uncovered and complexities that are hidden until it is too late. Modern IT systems are so complex that people will often have an incorrect or incomplete understanding of their operation. That's the nature of IT. The crit-sit story and the security story also show it. The one constant in these cases- and in almost all the cases we observed-was collaboration. We observed collaboration at many levels: within a small team, within an organization, and across organizations. We observed several different types of collaboration tools in use. We observed people switching from one tool to another as needs shifted. We also observed simultaneous use of several collaboration tools for different purposes. Not surprisingly, system administrators use the same collaboration tools as the rest of us, but these are not optimized for sysadmin needs-whether it is team brainstorming and debugging or secure information sharing. Though specific features can be implemented for system administrators, it is clear to us that because of the diverse needs among system administrators, a single collaboration tool will not work for all. There needs to be a variety of tools, and collaboration needs to be a first-class citizen in the work of system administration itself. Better collaboration support could relieve the burden on individuals of communicating and establishing shared context, and so avoiding missed information and enabling a persistent store for communication. We believe that improved tools for system administrator collaboration have great potential to significantly impact system administration work- perhaps even helping to reduce the ever-growing human portion of IT's total cost of ownership. © 2010 ACM.