CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Special Interest Groups (SIGs)
Managing the Information Technology Infrastructure: HCI Design for Network and System Management Applications
Thomas M. Graefe
Digital Equipment Corporation
550 King St. LKG 2-1/R11
Littleton, MA 01460 USA
+1 508 486 7335
tom.graefe@lkg.mts.dec.com
Dennis Wixon
Digital Equipment Corporation
110 Spitbrook Rd.
Nashua, NH 03062 USA
+1 603 881 2276
wixon@orion.enet.dec.com
Keywords
HCI Design, network management, agents, expert systems, visualization,
electronic performance support
© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
SUMMARY OF TOPIC
All too often the people responsible for the care and feeding
of the information technology infrastructure are poorly supported
by the very technology they must manage, even as the popularity
and use of networks (such as for the World Wide Web) grows. Corporate
MIS staffs spend billions of dollars just on managing their computing
infrastructures, and still they must continually cope with ineffectual
products that do not support them in their work. Moving a single user
within a corporate network is estimated
to cost an average of $2000.00 (see Business Research Group. Cost of a
Single Move/Add/Change to a Network. User Requirements for Network and
Distributed System Management, Newton, MA, August, 1995.) Recent
outages in America OnLine service are
examples of how failures in network management can affect thousands
of end users. This Special Interest Group (SIG) will provide
an opportunity for HCI practitioners and researchers in the domain
of network and system management to share information about the
problems faced by operators, system managers, administrators,
and end users, and to explore new techniques in user interface
design that might provide better support in the future.
ISSUES
Some of the main issues this SIG hopes to covers include:
- Enumerating the problems faced by operators and managers of
network and system technologies
- Migration to WEB-Based component applications for management
software
- Enhancing monitoring interfaces with new visualization techniques
for displaying, searching, and assessing large volumes of data
- Providing better customer support with the creation and use
of knowledge bases in expert systems or through the use of intelligent
agents
- Educating network and system managers with innovative Electronic
Performance Support providing training and information support
within an application user interface
- Better supporting cooperative work in this domain with software
for cross-organization work flow
GOALS
The goal of this SIG is to discuss two complementary areas in
user interface design for network and system management applications.
The first area is the definition and study of the unique problems
faced by the users in this domain. The second area includes new
techniques to solve HCI design problems, or successful novel uses
of old techniques. In short, a successful SIG will give participants
a chance to hear about the types of end user problems being addressed
by their peers as well as the nature of current or expected solutions.
If there is sufficient interest the leaders would like use the
information gathered in the SIG to create a workshop at a future
CHI meeting.
CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Special Interest Groups (SIGs)
