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"I needed to solve their overwhelmness": How System Administration Work was Affected by COVID-19

Authors:

Marijn Janssen, and

Tobias FiebigAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 6, Issue CSCW2

Article No.: 390, Pages 1 - 30

https://doi.org/10.1145/3555115

Published: 11 November 2022 Publication History

Abstract

The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic made working from home -- wherever working remotely is possible -- the norm for what had previously been office-based jobs across the world. This change in how we work created a challenging situation for system administrators (sysadmins), as they are the ones building and maintaining the digital infrastructure our world relies on.

In this paper, we examine how system administration work changed early in the pandemic from sysadmins' personal perspectives, through semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis. We find that sysadmins faced a two-sided crisis: While sysadmins' own work environment changed, they also had to react to the new situation and facilitate stable options to work online for themselves and their colleagues, supporting their users in adapting to the crisis. This finding embeds into earlier work on the connection between IT (security) work and the notion of 'care', where we substantiate these earlier findings with results from a repeatable method grounded in coordination theory.

Furthermore, while we find that sysadmins perceived no major changes in the way they work, by consecutively probing our interviewees, we find that they did experience several counter-intuitive effects on their work. This includes that while day-to-day communication became inherently more difficult, other tasks were streamlined by the remote working format and were seen as having become easier. Finally, by structuring our results according to a model of coordination and communication, we identify changes in sysadmins' coordination patterns. From these we derive recommendations for how system administration work can be coordinated, ranging beyond the immediate pandemic response and the transition to any 'new normal' way of working.

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Cited By

Nepal SHernandez JLewis RChaudhry AHouck BKnudsen ERojas RTankus BPrafullchandra HCzerwinski M(2024)Burnout in Cybersecurity Incident Responders: Exploring the Factors that Light the FireProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373048:CSCW1(1-35)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637304
Jenkins ALiu LWolters MVaniea K(2024)Not as easy as just update: Survey of System Administrators and Patching BehavioursProceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642456(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642456
Demjaha APym DCaulfield TParkin S(2024)‘The trivial tickets build the trust’: a co-design approach to understanding security support interactions in a large universityJournal of Cybersecurity10.1093/cybsec/tyae00710:1Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1093/cybsec/tyae007
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

"I needed to solve their overwhelmness": How System Administration Work was Affected by COVID-19
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Empirical studies in HCI

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Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Volume 6, Issue CSCW2

CSCW

November 2022

8205 pages

EISSN:2573-0142

DOI:10.1145/3571154

Editor:
Jeff Nichols
Google

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Copyright © 2022 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 November 2022

Published in PACMHCI Volume 6, Issue CSCW2

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Cited By

Nepal SHernandez JLewis RChaudhry AHouck BKnudsen ERojas RTankus BPrafullchandra HCzerwinski M(2024)Burnout in Cybersecurity Incident Responders: Exploring the Factors that Light the FireProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373048:CSCW1(1-35)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637304
Jenkins ALiu LWolters MVaniea K(2024)Not as easy as just update: Survey of System Administrators and Patching BehavioursProceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642456(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642456
Demjaha APym DCaulfield TParkin S(2024)‘The trivial tickets build the trust’: a co-design approach to understanding security support interactions in a large universityJournal of Cybersecurity10.1093/cybsec/tyae00710:1Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1093/cybsec/tyae007
George BIslam T(2024)The Role of Trust and Ethics in IT Administration and Its Impact on an OrganisationCybersecurity Challenges in the Age of AI, Space Communications and Cyborgs10.1007/978-3-031-47594-8_16(307-320)Online publication date: 20-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47594-8_16
Kaur MSri Ramulu HAcar YFiebig T(2023)"Oh yes! over-preparing for meetings is my jam :)": The Gendered Experiences of System AdministratorsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35796177:CSCW1(1-38)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579617

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