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Computerworld - Harwell Thrasher is an author, speaker and coach specializing in the human side of IT. His Web site is MakingITclear.com. Thrasher talked with Kathleen Melymuka about his new book, Boiling the IT Frog, which aims to clarify IT for business people who really dont understand it, and to help IT professionals who understand it completely but dont know quite how to explain it.



What does the books title mean? According to a myth, if you put a frog in boiling water, it will hop out, but if you put it in a pot of water at room temperature and gradually heat up the water, the frog will become accustomed to the increasing temperature and stay in the pot until its cooked. Change agents use this myth to describe how organizations get into situations that they would never tolerate if they knew the final result in advance. Thats what has happened in IT. Business people would never tolerate the current state of IT if they could see where they were headed, but they got used to things gradually.

You write that magic in IT isnt a good thing. What is magic in IT, and why isnt it good? This idea came from an Arthur C. Clarke quote, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Magic and IT have a lot in common. Magic has strange words: abracadabra, hocus-pocus. We in IT have SQL, ERP, SOAP. Magic has this inherent idea that you see things that happen and you dont quite understand why but you know they do, so you suspend logical thinking. Business people tend to regard IT as something magical, and so they dont apply their own logical thinking. This suspension of logic is why business has so much trouble with IT. It creates unrealistic expectations.

Theres also the concept of the wizard in magic: people who can do magical things. In business organizations, there are wizards  users who have gotten good at an application. And in IT organizations, there are wizards too. The wizards want to keep systems the way they are to maintain their wizard status. As a result, you get stuck with a system that doesnt get better.

You say that without trust, IT is useless. Why? And how do you establish trust? Business people will never have the detailed understanding of technology that IT people have. But the business people need to feel that the right technology decisions are being made. Thats where the trust comes in. Without trust, business people keep second-guessing everything the IT organization does, and IT cant be successful.