Eben M. Haber

CoScripter: automating & sharing how-to knowledge in the enterprise

Modern enterprises are replete with numerous online processes. Many must be performed frequently and are tedious, while others are done less frequently yet are complex or hard to remember. We present interviews with knowledge workers that reveal a need for mechanisms to automate the execution of and to share knowledge about these processes. In response, we have developed the CoScripter system (formerly Koala [11]), a collaborative scripting environment for recording, automating, and sharing web-based processes. We have deployed CoScripter within a large corporation for more than 10 months. Through usage log analysis and interviews with users, we show that CoScripter has addressed many user automation and sharing needs, to the extent that more than 50 employees have voluntarily incorporated it into their work practice. We also present ways people have used CoScripter and general issues for tools that support automation and sharing of how-to knowledge.

Field studies of computer system administrators: analysis of system management tools and practices

Computer system administrators are the unsung heroes of the information age, working behind the scenes to configure, maintain, and troubleshoot the computer infrastructure that underlies much of modern life. However, little can be found in the literature about the practices and problems of these highly specialized computer users. We conducted a series of field studies in large corporate data centers, observing organizations, work practices, tools, and problem-solving strategies of system administrators. We found system administrators operate within large-scale, complex environments that present significant technical, social, cognitive, and business challenges. In this paper, we describe system administrator tool use in critical, high-cost, labor-intensive work through observational, survey, and interview data. We discuss our findings concerning administrator needs for coordinating work, maintaining situation awareness, planning and rehearsing complex procedures, building tools, and supporting complicated interleaved workflows.

Creek watch: pairing usefulness and usability for successful citizen science

Citizen science projects can collect a wealth of scientific data, but that data is only helpful if it is actually used. While previous citizen science research has mostly focused on designing effective capture interfaces and incentive mechanisms, in this paper we explore the application of HCI methods to ensure that the data itself is useful. To provide a focus for this exploration we designed and implemented Creek Watch, an iPhone application and website that allow volunteers to report information about waterways in order to aid water management programs. Working with state and local officials and private groups involved in water monitoring, we conducted a series of contextual inquiries to uncover what data they wanted, what data they could immediately use, and how to most effectively deliver that data to them. We iteratively developed the Creek Watch application and website based on our findings and conducted evaluations of it with both contributors and consumers of water data, including scientists at the city water resources department. Our study reveals that the data collected is indeed useful for their existing practices and is already in use in water and trash management programs. Our results suggest the application of HCI methods to design the data for the end users is just as important as their use in designing the user interface.

Design guidelines for system administration tools developed through ethnographic field studies

Information Technology system administrators (sysadmins) perform the crucial and never-ending work of maintaining the technical infrastructure on which our society depends. Computer systems grow more complex every year, however, and the cost of administration is an ever increasing fraction of total system cost - IT systems are growing harder to manage. To better understand this problem, we undertook a series of field studies of system administration work over the past four years, visiting a variety of enterprise and large university sites. One of our most compelling observations was how often the tools used by system administrators were not well aligned with their work practices. We believe that this misalignment was the result of administration tools designed without a complete understanding of the full context of administration work. To promote the design of better tools, this paper describes system administration work in more detail based on examples from our field studies, outlines the dimensions along which enterprise sysadmins differ significantly from other computer users, and provides a set of guidelines for tools to better support how administrators actually work.

A1: end-user programming for web-based system administration

System administrators work with many different tools to manage and fix complex hardware and software infrastructure in a rapidly paced work environment. Through extensive field studies, we observed that they often build and share custom tools for specific tasks that are not supported by vendor tools. Recent trends toward web-based management consoles offer many advantages but put an extra burden on system administrators, as customization requires web programming, which is beyond the skills of many system administrators. To meet their needs, we developed A1, a spreadsheet-based environment with a task-specific system-administration language for quickly creating small tools or migrating existing scripts to run as web portlets. Using A1, system administrators can build spreadsheets to access remote and heterogeneous systems, gather and integrate status data, and orchestrate control of disparate systems in a uniform way. A preliminary user study showed that in just a few hours, system administrators can learn to use A1 to build relatively complex tools from scratch.

Activity-based management of IT service delivery

Growth, adaptability, innovation, and cost control are leading concerns of businesses, especially with respect to use of information technology (IT). Though standards such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) offer the potential for cost savings through the use of formal processes and best practices, such top-down approaches tend to be either highlevel - often far removed from the actual work - or low-level - often inflexible given the rapid pace of technology and market change. We conducted field studies to examine work practices in IT service delivery. Our results suggest that unstructured work activities comprise a significant and vital portion of the overall work done by people in IT service delivery. These activities include negotiating work items and schedules, seeking and providing information and expertise, and using and sharing custom tools and practices. Unstructured activities are conducted in parallel to formal, structured IT service processes, but are not well supported by existing integrated tooling. Thus, they are not easily accounted for and rarely result in reusable assets or feedback to improve the formal IT processes. Based on these findings, we propose an administrator workspace aimed specifically at blending structured and unstructured work activities to support effective, reusable, and quantifiable IT service delivery.

Collaboration in system administration

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

Evolution of storage management: transforming raw data into information

Exponential growth in storage requirements and an increasing number of heterogeneous devices and application policies are making enterprise storage management a nightmare for administrators. Back-of-the-envelope calculations, rules of thumb, and manual correlation of individual device data are too error prone for the day-to-day administrative tasks of resource provisioning, problem determination, performance management, and impact analysis. Storage management tools have evolved over the past several years from standardizing the data reported by storage subsystems to providing intelligent planners. In this paper, we describe that evolution in the context of the IBM Total Storage® Productivity Center (TPC)--a suite of tools to assist administrators in the day-to-day tasks of monitoring, configuring, provisioning, managing change, analyzing configuration, managing performance, and determining problems. We describe our ongoing research to develop ways to simplify and automate these tasks by applying advanced analytics on the performance statistics and raw configuration and event data collected by TPC using the popular Storage Management Initiative-Specification (SMI-S). In addition, we provide details of SMART (storage management analytics and reasoning technology) as a library that provides a collection of data-aggregation functions and optimization algorithms.

System U: automatically deriving personality traits from social media for people recommendation

This paper presents a system, System U, which automatically derives peoples personality traits from social media and recommends people for different tasks. The system leverages linguistic signals appearing in a persons social media activities to compute the personality portraits including Big Five personality, fundamental needs and basic human values. This system and technology can be used in a wide variety of personalized applications, such as recommending people to answer questions.

From Data to Insight Work Practices of Analysts in the Enterprise

With greater availability of data, businesses are increasingly becoming data-driven enterprises, establishing standards for data acquisition, processing, infrastructure, and decision making. Enterprises now have people dedicated to performing analytic work to support decision makers. To better understand analytic work, particularly the role of enterprise business analysts, researchers interviewed 34 analysts at a large corporation. Analytical work occurred in an ecosystem of data, tools, and people; the ecosystems overall quality and efficiency depended on the amount of coordination and collaboration. Analysts were the bridge between business and IT, closing the semantic gap between datasets, tools, and people. This article provides an overview of the analytic work in the enterprise, describing challenges in data, tools, and practices and identifying opportunities for new tools for collaborative analytics.