TOPICS

Original contributions are sought broadly on workplace studies, processes and practices, organizational knowledge, design, experimental studies, tools, and automation approaches for IT management. More specifically topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Workspace Studies:

Workplace studies are essential in recovering real practice and informing the design of new technologies. In the context of IT, the study of people, practices, and organizations becomes even more critical, as an individual worker typically plays many roles, and work is typically fragmented into towers of expertise and geographically dispersed. Topics of interest in this area include:

Processes and Practices:

Delivering high quality IT often requires careful planning and establishing processes and practices in problem tracking, configuration management, capacity planning, security incident handling, service desk, etc. Processes and practices may vary from shop to shop depending on the particular circumstances. Topics of interest in this area include:

Organizational Knowledge:

System administration is a complex blend of interactions among people, computers, and information. Knowledge plays a central role in an IT organization, and it is often organized around towers of expertise. The success of an IT organization depends largely on its ability to put together a team of experts to focus on a problem. Topics of interest in this area include:

Design:

The complexity, scale, and risks associated with IT management create significant design challenges. Typical IT management activities include tasks that require dozens of steps to perform, analysis of thousands of entries in system logs, and making sense from hundreds of configuration specifications that are interrelated. Improving ease-of-use by simplifying the system model may not be the right approach in all cases---it might sometimes be better to increase the transparency of a complex system for it to be understood and fixed. Issues such as human recall and recognition, reversibility and complexity of computer actions, immediacy of feedback and presentation of information should be carefully considered. Topics of interest in this area include:

Experimental Studies:

Carefully controlled experimental user studies are likely to lead to fundamental laws of interaction with complex systems in the long run. In the shorter term, experimental studies will help us understand tradeoffs in designing interaction for systems management. Topics of interest in this area include:

Tools and Techniques:

Though improving system performance has long been the goal of IT management, manageability is the goal of the future. Toward that end, effective tools that are situated in the context of IT work are essential. Topics of interest in this area include:

Automation:

The increasing ratio of human cost to hardware and software cost in overall IT budgets led many IT companies to consider automation solutions. It may be argued that automation of IT has its own characteristics that sets it apart from past automation efforts in aviation, power plant control, and other traditional areas. Certainly, IT systems that drive business applications today have unique problems and issues, as configurations, architectures, and workloads change frequently. IT automation will have fundamental affects on not only how systems are operated but also on the IT management services offered and service delivery organizations, changing the flow of information flow, coordination points and languages and control. Topics of interest in this area include:

IT Beyond Traditional Large Enterprises:

IT management challenges are not confined within the organizational boundaries of large enterprises, but are encountered in many diverse settings across societies, such as individual home offices and entertainment centers, small organizations, virtual and highly distributed organizations, interfaces between enterprises with fuzzy boundaries, and enterprises employing new organizational forms like network vs. hierarchical structures. Many of these settings have features that make them quite different from traditional corporate, academic, and government environments with professionally-managed IT. New organizational forms are enabled by IT yet make IT management problems even more difficult, while homes and small offices often depend on IT with limited access to technology expertise. Topics of interest in this area include: