Information needs of system administrators in information technology service factories

Abstract

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. © 2011 ACM.