With System Administration, precisely speaking Computer Systems' Administration, since I am occasionally calling myself a system administrator, I mean the following:
Computer Systems' Administration means management of computer infrastructures in a way to minimize human-computer interaction.
In other words, system administrators should manage, order, build,
install, configure, and maintain (your) computers so that you will have
to use them less, or not at all. The definition applies to itself in so
far as system administrators will seek to minimize their own
human-computer interaction.
The act of system administration is somewhat like medical
care. A medical practitioner should keep you healthy, and, if she
or he succeeds in doing so, you should never need to see your doctor.
Best system administration means you should never need to work with
computers.
And, just like medical practitioners, system administrators are to
keep confidential any information to which they have access.
Compared to my definition of a system administrator an Operator, precisely speaking a Computer Systems' Operator, will try to keep computer systems running, whereas a system administrator will try to get rid of them. Though, every system administrator essentially relies on system operators as long as computers are in use (and be it that the system administrator her- or himself does the job).
My Definition Of System Administration
URL: https://fam.tuwien.ac.at/~schamane/sysadmin/sysadmdef.php
Last modification: 2007-11-10
Copyright 2007-2022 by Andreas Schamanek
Home page: https://fam.tuwien.ac.at/~schamane/
Letters to author: andreas.schamanek@tuwien.ac.at