by The current issue of “Communications of the ACM” has a write-up from the HCI team at IBM Research, Almaden, San Jose CA that has been studying sysadmins in their natural environment. If you missed their presentation at LISA, catch it here: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/1/103203-collaboration-in-system-administration/fulltext
They mention,
“Incorrect or incomplete understanding of highly complex systems is a common source of problems for sysadmins”
This is so spot on! I’m very interested in configuration management, documentation and training — it all comes down to knowledge management and effective use of knowledge.