We’re all familiar with the term disruption. Most of the time it’s a negative experience, but sometimes it brings about much-needed change. For those of us in the IT space, disruption generally means a journey to digital transformation. I use the word journey because that’s exactly what it is—you start in one place and through incremental changes, whether to your infrastructure or your workforce, you end up someplace else.

Too often, managing this process is referred to as change management, but I’m here to tell you that is incorrect. Simply put, journey management is not change management. It involves more than just training. Journey management is a strategy in how you take employees from one position of knowledge to another position of knowledge. It’s about ensuring that the journey is as quick as possible, that it doesn’t degrade much during the changes, and that adoption results in a new performance level that’s also sustainable.

Our job as IS/IT professionals is not to deliver applications. It is instead to ensure sustainable adoption of the solutions. This applies not only to the application and technology to enable it, but also the processes and talent that will use and maintain the solution. And the way you get there is through journey management.

IT and Business Teams Working Together on Journey Management