Managing the information technology infrastructure: HCI design for network and system management applications

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. 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.