The Paranoid Agnostic

IT Managers have a hard job. A significant challenge is obtaining good information to guide their management practices. While many established professions have literature to help with this, IT’s professional literature is just emerging. Here are three resources that can help:

The Practice of System and Network Adminstration (2nd Ed.) by Limoncelli, Hogan, and Chalup.

Go by this now. Seriously. By a copy for yourself and your favourite sysadmin. While your at it, buy Limoncelli’s book “Time Management for Systems Administrators”. If you don’t buy this book and read it, your throwing away money. You are probably also losing good people and opportunities as well.

Proceedings of CHIMIT: Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology

The papers from this conference are publicly available. Each year, this conference includes coverage of “Field Studies” where researches observe and study systems administrators and how they work. What makes sysadmins tick? What difficulties do they encounter when they do their jobs? What contributes to their succesess and failures? How do they work together? What can lower the number of mistakes made by sysadmins? The conference also covers how interfaces can be designed to support the work of systems administrators.

Proceedings of the ACM SIGMIS CPR Conference on Computer Personnel Research

This is available from the ACM Digital Library. Members can get access fairly cheap, or your local library may have access for free. This is a conference that disseminates research about IT Professionals (“Computer Personnel Research”). What motivates career decisions and satisfaction in IT? How are IT goals established and achieved? How do you manage IT groups and projects? What makes users accept or resist IT change? How do IT operations generate value? What is the impact of IT skill development? The papers cover a wide-variety of topics and the scope ranges from small to global, with international coverage.