An Examination of Work Practices and Tool Use in High Risk Environments

Abstract

This research presents an in-depth investigation and description of a single user group, system administrators. Following an overview of these computing professionals and their complex, risky work environment, system administrator work practices were investigated using data collected from previous experience, interviews, a usability study, and the literature. This research contributes to existing knowledge by presenting an analysis of system administrator work practices and identifying them as broker technicians. As such, many of the findings of this study may apply to other broker technicians. Because the work of system administration is so dependent upon technology and the way sysadmins access and control that technology, investigations of tool use were then studied. Through an analysis of work practices related to tool use, attributes important to system administrator work practices were identified. These attributes fell into two categories: information quality (currency, completeness, accuracy, format, logging, and verification) and system quality (reliability, flexibility, integration, accessibility, speed, scriptability, credibility, situation awareness, and monitoring).This research proposes the use of Wixom and Todd's (2005) integrated user satisfaction model in the context of system administration. This theoretical model provides an opportunity to link the identified characteristics with system administrator beliefs and tool usage. This research contributes to existing knowledge by identifying information and system quality attributes important to system administrators, and empirically testing the modified user satisfaction model in the untested context of system administration. The user satisfaction model was found to be significant and predictive of system administrator tool use behaviors, with two information quality attributes (accuracy and verification) and two system quality attributes (reliability and credibility) significant.