IT Does Matter

The request said the register was slow. The register was not slow. It was seventeen taps long.

Tim Ruefli has one year left at the university and fourteen hours a week at its IT help desk, where every problem on campus arrives as a request with a clock already running. He knows how to close them. Then he walks down to a dining hall and watches Dolores, thirty years in campus dining, tap her way through screen after screen to sell one breakfast sandwich and a tea. Nothing is broken. And the request will not stay closed.

What starts as one request becomes his senior year. A professor who wants to know who is standing in the line. A food bank with three hundred households to sign in before two o'clock, forty-eight seconds each, and a seventy-six-year-old volunteer who built the whole system and wrote none of it down. His parents' auto shop on Lake City Way, where fifteen years of customers live inside a program that charges the shop to leave. An aerospace plant where an empty shelf orders its own parts. And back at the desk, an AI tool that will close requests by itself, and a phone call in a professor's voice that the professor never made.

By spring the offers are on the table, and every one of them wants an answer.

IT Does Matter is a novel about starting out in information systems, and about the people who keep a place running when no system knows how they do it.

This book includes a Reader's Companion with key terms and discussion questions, for readers and classrooms that want them.

Book 1 of The HarborWorks Novels. Each book stands alone.