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