Common-mode failure| www.sciencedirect.com
The underlying and often unexamined assumption for the benefits of automation is the notion that computers/machines are better at some tasks, and humans are better at a different, non-overlapping set of tasks. Historically this has been characterized as HABA-MABA (Humans are Better at; Machines are| www.linkedin.com
Rather than focusing on the events that result in alerts, Fred proposes we look at the system and center it on the operators instead.| Honeycomb
In this article, SRE Lex Neva provides guidelines for AIOps vendors on how to build confidence with SREs: Will you improve their life? How?| Honeycomb
A work discussion made me surface this set of notes from one of my favorite chapters ever because it explained limits of automation so well to me. It is On People and Computers in JCSs at Work, Chapter 11 of the book Joint Cognitive Systems: Patterns in Cognitive Systems Engineering (pp.143-165). And yeah, it's by David D Woods again.| ferd.ca
I can't believe I had not yet posted notes about this absolute classic and fundamental paper from Lisanne Bainbridge titled Ironies of Automation. The author has a website where she posted her own revision of it almost 40 years after publication, and it's worth giving it a glance. It has over 1800 citations, its own Wikipedia page, and is just an unavoidable part of any literature that concerns itself with automation.| ferd.ca
A cool paper I've read recently is Morgan G. Ames' Charismatic Technology. In this one, she proposes the concept of Charismatic Technology as an explanation for the holding power that some technologies exhibit for long periods of times, even if they fail to deliver on their promises time and time again. The paper is written with a focus on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which had the XO laptop as a figurehead:| ferd.ca
