Complex activities in an Operations Center: A Case Study and Model for Engineering Interaction Judith M. Brown Carleton University Ottawa, Canada mmjbrown@connect.carleton.ca Steven Greenspan CA Labs, CA Technologies 200 Princeton S. Corp Center Steven.Greenspan@ca.com Robert Biddle Carleton University Ottawa, Canada Robert_Biddle@Carleton.Ca ABSTRACT Data operations and command centers are crucial for managing today’s Internet-based economy. Despite advances in automation, the challenges placed on operations professionals continue to increase as they work individually or in teams to repair or proactively avoid service disruptions. Although there have been a few studies of collaborative work in military supervisory control centers, due to the sensitive nature of work in operating centers, there have been few studies on the activities that take place in commercial data centers. In this case study of a large, complex data operations and control center, activity theory is used to guide and interpret observations of individual and collaborative work. This resulted in a model of data operations activities, and the identification of tensions that arise within and between these activities. This model is of value to interaction engineers in the first phase of a user-centered engineering methodology. Using this model, we provide some recommendations for reducing some of the tensions we found, and discuss significant opportunities and challenges in this new domain for the HCI community. Author Keywords Modeling; activity theory; attention; data operations centers. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. [Information interfaces and presentation]: Miscellaneous. INTRODUCTION Individual and collaborative work in data operations and command centers is increasingly complex and crucial for managing today’s Internet-enabled economy. The work in operations centers is therefore expected to undergo rapid transformation to meet rising demands. Emerging technologies in automation, network monitoring, and analytics, together with user-oriented trends in handheld mobile computing, wall-sized and tabletop shared displays, and visualization, show great promise in meeting this demand if the application of these technologies are carefully integrated into current workplace practices. This paper describes a case study of current software usage in a large control center. The goal is to understand successes, problems, and challenges as a basis for future engineering-based interaction design work. Rather than evaluate each software application and user interface individually we are concerned with how all the parts fit together into goal-oriented activities and how these activities support or inhibit one another. From this vantage point we can gain insights to guide future design, as well as identify gaps in software usefulness and usability. In today’s operations and command centers, human operators are needed to monitor networks and facilitate corrective actions, despite increasing automation [20]. The automated responses to network and platform anomalies are not perfect. To maintain IT services, operators must contend with the problems created or amplified by automation [7], as well as with the root causes of IT service disruptions. Supporting IT services is thus a complex job requiring sophisticated pattern matching, situation awareness, decision-making, as well as endurance, dedication, and sustained multitasking skills [7][20]. Figure 1: Example of a command and control center [27]. Image provided by the Highways Agency, under the Open Government License, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government- licence/ 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. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. EICS’13, June 24–27, 2013, London, United Kingdom. Copyright © 2013 ACM 978-1-4503-2138-9/13/06...$15.00.