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Understanding and supporting personal activity management by IT service workers

Published: 14 November 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Many recent studies provide evidence of the challenges experienced by knowledge workers while multi-tasking among several projects and initiatives. Work is often interrupted, and this results in people leaving activities pending until they have the time, information, resources or energy to reassume them. Among the different types of knowledge workers, those working directly with Information Technology (IT) or offering IT services -- software developers, support engineers, systems administrators or database managers --, experience particularly challenging scenarios of multi-tasking given the varied, crisis-driven and reactive nature of their work. Previous recommendations and technological solutions to ameliorate these challenges give limited attention to individual's preferences and to understanding how and what tools and strategies could benefit IT service workers as individuals. Based on the analysis of characteristics of IT service work and a consolidation of findings regarding personal activity management processes, we present the design of a software tool to support those processes and discuss findings of its usage by four IT service workers over a period of eight weeks. We found that the tool is used as a central repository to orchestrate personal activity, complementing the use of e-mail clients and shared calendars as well as supporting essential aspects of IT-service work such as multi-tasking and detailed work articulation.

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Cited By

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  • (2019)Incentivizing Distributive Fairness for Crowdsourcing WorkersProceedings of the 18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3306127.3331720(404-412)Online publication date: 8-May-2019
  • (2014)A response selection model for intrusion response systemsSecurity and Communication Networks10.1002/sec.8967:11(1831-1848)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2014
  • (2011)Knowledge and information and needs of system administrators in IT service factoriesProceedings of the 10th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems and the 5th Latin American Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.5555/2254436.2254453(81-90)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2011
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cover image ACM Conferences
CHiMiT '08: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology
November 2008
82 pages
ISBN:9781605583556
DOI:10.1145/1477973
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 14 November 2008

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Author Tags

  1. information technology workers
  2. multi-tasking
  3. personal activity management
  4. planning
  5. productivity
  6. time management

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Overall Acceptance Rate 15 of 43 submissions, 35%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2019)Incentivizing Distributive Fairness for Crowdsourcing WorkersProceedings of the 18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3306127.3331720(404-412)Online publication date: 8-May-2019
  • (2014)A response selection model for intrusion response systemsSecurity and Communication Networks10.1002/sec.8967:11(1831-1848)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2014
  • (2011)Knowledge and information and needs of system administrators in IT service factoriesProceedings of the 10th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems and the 5th Latin American Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.5555/2254436.2254453(81-90)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2011
  • (2011)Information needs of system administrators in information technology service factoriesProceedings of the 5th ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology10.1145/2076444.2076447(1-10)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2011
  • (2010)Quality of IT service delivery — Analysis and framework for human error prevention2010 IEEE International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA)10.1109/SOCA.2010.5707161(1-8)Online publication date: Dec-2010

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