Transforming the Identity License
Every technology transformation plan accounts for data, systems, and timelines. Almost none of them account for the people who have to let go of who they were to use the new tool.
Resistance to organizational AI adoption is most often viewed as skepticism.
More often, I think it’s actually coming from a place of grief.
I watched variations of this time and again at Adobe, watching people migrate from Sitecore to AEM 6.3 to 6.5 to Cloud Service. From Marketo to AJO.
The person who signed the contract was thinking about Digital or Organizational Transformation. Those folks on the working team find themselves thrust into Identity Transformation.
We're so focused on updating the software that we forget about the human firmware that makes it all work.
Except, of course, people aren't firmware. They don't automatically update to a new version because the organization changed platforms. They have to reconcile years of accumulated expertise, recognition, and identity with a future that suddenly looks very different.. and is asking them to look pretty different, too.
When they migrated from Sitecore to AEM, they spent weeks collaborating on a plan that would entail months of migration activities. Content, metadata, permissions, integrations, taxonomy… all of it was planned for. At no point did the organization really think how to solve migrating the identities of people who’d built their careers on Sitecore expertise into an AEM framework.
No real acknowledgment of what had been lost by those Subject Matter Experts who were suddenly Subject Matter Novices.
Even if things like training are baked-in to the plan, and even if those Novices move considerably closer to Expert levels on the new platform, they’re still not really an AEM person… that Sitecore SME identity runs deeper than their knowledge. Old knowledge can be forgotten or just put on the back burner, new knowledge can be acquired. The identity, on the other hand, is much stickier.
In hindsight, this was almost inevitable.
They’re called _technology_ transformations, after all. We staff them with architects, engineers, developers, consultants, and project managers. We build migration plans for systems.
Why would we suddenly start thinking about identity?
The blind spot isn't because organizations don't care about people. It's because they're solving exactly the problem they named.
Identities have a stickiness that startup founders can only dream of. That Sitecore SME got a job as a user or developer, and spent years honing that skill. Getting acknowledged and positively reinforced along the way as they learned more and became better, faster, more efficient. They might have been targeted on LinkedIn for job opportunities or been promoted because of their contributions. All feeding into their identity as a Sitecore SME. Every day they’d wake up and renew that SME Identity License, integrating deeper and deeper into their ecosystem.
And of course, our identities don’t only live in the present or past. They were investments into a future we imagined would reward those skills. We imagine where those identities might take us. The recognition, or maybe just the stability of being an expert with that tool and that company, dependent on the tool. Digital Transformations represent a sizable shift in how that team member expected their world to unfold.
No amount of Prosci ADKAR Certified Practitioners can really manage that type of change. Not because ADKAR is a bad model—I’m certified myself—but because change management frameworks focus on organizational adoption while underestimating personal identity.
The introduction of AI makes this dynamic even more pressing. We're no longer just replacing platforms... we're introducing digital coworkers and reshaping the work people have built their professional identities around.
Honestly, making an ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) metaphor is way too on the nose for me to bother writing here. Please fill in that blank with your own witticism.
We spend enormous amounts of effort to migrate data from old platforms to new, version after version, because that data has value that businesses can readily see.
Meanwhile, we put little to no effort into migrating the professional identities of our team members.
We assume those identities will migrate alongside the data basically for free. We offshore the risks and costs of Identity Transformation onto the individual. And to be fair, that is where much of the work lives.
But organizations still have an opportunity, and I think a responsibility, to consider how they plan for and empower that migration.
If organizations don't start considering their team's Identity Transformations along the way, they risk losing people who contain valuable institutional knowledge.
Sometimes that's a good thing.
Often it isn't.
How many times might that old Sitecore SME decide to find a new organization where they can once again be the hot new Sitecore SME, walking out the door carrying years of organizational experience with them? Experience that extends far beyond the boundaries of the CMS itself.
The tool might have changed. The basic domain knowledge usually didn't. It was just hiding behind a tool-specific façade. AEM might handle content differently, but content architecture is still content architecture.
Taxonomy is taxonomy, regardless of the DAM.
Audience data is audience data.
Even in the midst of a rebrand, the brand standards probably aren't changing enough to invalidate years of accumulated experience. That knowledge carries value that doesn't really care what tool you're using to deploy it.
Helping your team break down those tool-bound silos and recognize the broader Domain Expertise sitting just beyond them can have enormous impact on the individual... and significant value for the business.
If you can help your team recognize that they don't need to become Tool Experts or AI Experts, but instead experts in their domain, they'll be better equipped to navigate whatever platform comes next and better positioned to leverage AI along the way. They won't be approaching their work through the lens of a particular tool, but through the lens of the problem they're actually trying to solve.
The organizations best positioned to succeed with AI will be the ones that recognize Identity Transformation as part of the transformation process itself.
Eventually, I think we'll stop thinking about Organizational Transformation as a single initiative and start recognizing that every meaningful transformation actually happens across three parallel layers.
Every Organizational Transformation Happens on Three Layers:
You need the entire ecosystem to transform together in order to deliver on the vision that drove the decision to begin the Technology Transformation in the first place.
Identity Transformation isn't asking your team to become new people. It's helping them recognize that their value extends beyond a single tool or task.
It's helping them become more resilient, perhaps even anti-fragile, when the next transformation comes along.
Because there is always a next one.
With AI in particular, we’re forcing people to confront identity at its very core, as it can take on increasingly more of their role’s scope.
Their identity will transition either way. Whether that be to an updated version working for you, or as a migrated version working for someone else.
Ryan Yepsen
Ryan writes about enterprise AI, customer reality, systems thinking, and the operating conditions that make meaningful execution either possible or painful.