Eben's Bibliography

Past: Many years ago, I did work at the University of Wisconsin on user interfaces for object-oriented databases.  That work can be found here.

Present: After a number of years in product development, I came back to research.  I've been working on studies of system administration, and also end-user programming.

System Administration:

Who are System Administrators?  What are their work practices?  What tools do they use?  The following papers were informed by ethnographic field studies of system administrators in the wild.

Title
Authors
Venue
Comments
Scripting practices in complex systems management
Scripting practices in complex systems management
Proceedings of the Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for the Management of Information Technology, 2009
Discusses the importance of scripting in system administration work, and describes scripting practices amoung sysadmins.
Studying Reactive, Risky, Complex, Long-Spanning, and Collaborative Work: The Case of IT Service Delivery
E Kandogan, E M Haber, J H Bailey, P P Maglio
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 2009
Describes field study and survey methods used for studying system administrators.
Policy-based IT automation: the role of human judgment
E Kandogan, J Bailey, P P Maglio, E Haber
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology, 2008 Policy-based automation is one approach to improving IT administration, this paper describes actual policy use in system administration.
"System administrator teamwork: evidence from the SAGE salary survey"
Haber, Eben
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology, 2008
A poster analyzing new questions in the SAGE annual salary survey on the topic of collaboration.
"Distributed Cognition and Joint Activity in Computer-System Administration." Maglio, Paul P, Eser Kandogan, and Eben Haber Resources, co-evolution, and artifacts: Theory in CSCW.  Ed. M.S. Ackerman, C. Halverson, T. Erickson, and W. A. Kellogg.  Kluwer CSCW Series, 2007 Investigates problem-solving among system administrators.
"Security Administrators: A Breed Apart."    Haber, Eben, and Eser Kandogan SOUPS 2007 Workshop on Usable IT Security Management. How are security administrators different from other system administrators, and computer users in general?
"Design Guidelines for System Administration Tools Developed through Ethnographic Field Studies."
Haber, Eben, and John Bailey
The 2007 Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for the Management of Information Technology, CHIMIT '07.
How can we make tools for system administrators that better align with their work practices?
"Activity-based management of IT service delivery." Bailey, John, Eser Kandogan, Eben Haber, Paul P. Maglio The 2007 Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for the Management of Information Technology, CHIMIT '07. Can tooling better support the activities involed in IT service delivery?
"Security Administrators in the Wild: Ethnographic Studies of Security Administrators." Haber, Eben and Eser Kandogan Presented at the SIG CHI 2007 Workshop on Security User Studies: Methodologies and Best Practices. Is ethnography a reasonable method for studying security administration, and security practices in general?
"Security Administration Tools and Practices." Kandogan, Eser, and Eben M. Haber Security and Usability: Designing Secure Systems that People Can Use. Ed. Lorrie Faith Cranor and Simson Garfinkel. Sebastapol: O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2005, pp357-378. A description of security administration work practices and environment.
"Sensemaking Sysadmins: Lessons from the Field." Haber, Eben Presented at the Sensemaking Workshop at ACM CHI 2005.
System administrators are an excellent example of sensemaking professionals, though they are often overlooked as such.
"Field Studies of Computer System Administrators: Analysis of System Management Tools and Practices." Barrett, R., Kandogan, E., Maglio, P. P., Haber, E. M., Takayama, L. A., Prabaker, M. Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work CSCW '04. Describes system administrator tools and work practices.
"Distributed Cognition Analysis of Attention and Trust in Collaborative Problem Solving." Maglio, Paul P., Eser Kandogan, and Eben Haber Proc. Cognitive Science 2003. Investigates problem-solving among system administrators.

End-User Programming: