The Change Agents

As applied to technology training, “change management” can involve any number of things: clarifying the business goals that a particular application is supposed to address; designing or customizing the application itself; determining how it will affect the ways that various people or units perform their jobs; and “selling” those people on the need for and the reasoning behind the change. Only after those issues are addressed, experts say, should attention turn to the actual training challenge—that is, how to design, deliver, and reinforce training that will not only teach the new application but ease the transition to the new way of doing things. 

What’s Changing?

All technology-training situations are not created equal, of course. A marketing person who, on her own initiative and for her own reasons, signs up for a course on Microsoft PowerPoint may be nervous about her ability to master the program, but she is not a “change resistor.” The same applies to information-technology (IT) specialists who take courses in pursuit of professional credentials such as Cisco Certified Network Associate or Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator.

In some training situations, however, change resistance can become an issue even for IT specialists. This is likely to occur, for instance, when an employer asks them to switch platforms, says Dan McCabe, a principal with Intertech, Inc., in Eagan, which specializes in high-end training for software developers, systems engineers, and other such professionals. In the IT world, “historically there are strong marriages between people and technology,” McCabe explains. For instance, “you love Microsoft and hate Java, or vice versa. But organizations today use multiple technologies and multiple platforms. So if I’m a Java developer at Target, say, and my application is going to move to Microsoft’s .NET platform, getting me motivated can be difficult.”

The term “change management” has a particular meaning for the people who build and maintain corporate IT networks. Leslie Kapocius, director of business development for New Horizons of Minnesota, an education firm in Edina, points out that change management is a specific category within the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a codified set of best management practices developed in the United Kingdom for building and running an organization’s IT service.

Effective change management in the ITIL sense is especially vital when a company is changing enterprise-level applications, as in a switch, say, from an Oracle to an SAP platform, Kapocius says. “We have clients who have done mergers and acquisitions over the years, winding up with different systems and compatibility issues. A [chief information officer] will say, ‘We’ve got to consolidate.’ That can effect every process in the business—billing, accounting, human resources, customer relationship management . . . everything.”

The ITIL-level work that goes into such a switch is largely invisible to employees outside the IT department—unless something goes wrong. But when it comes to teaching everyone else to use the new applications, this is the kind of change that demands the greatest attention to factors other than straightforward technology training. If the marketing specialist who wants to learn PowerPoint represents the easy end of the change-management spectrum, this is the hard end.