Iva Harris is well-known by Canadian enterprises and public sector offices. One of 2020’s WIIT honourees has been with Softlanding since its inception in 2000 and for the past 20 years, has been helping clients move their critical business workloads to the cloud and cut through much of the noise that plagues the tech market.
With a wealth of experience in project and change management, Iva brings a strong body knowledge to each engagement and team she works with. That experience is bolstered by several years with Syscom Consulting where she was responsible for implementing Enterprise Content Management solutions prior to joining Softlanding. Over the past six months, Iva has met with dozens of new clients scrambling to modernize business in the midst of the remote work era. The healthcare sector has been one of the hardest-hit sectors.
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Because of COVID, a lot of our clients have had to make the shift to the cloud and provide their workforce with the ability to work. Being able to still collaborate with others, including business partners and clients, in a secure way, is something almost everyone is seeking,” she explained. “We’ve done a lot of projects like that in the last six months. One of our largest projects, for example, involves a provincial health services authority, and we’re migrating approximately 130,000 people to the cloud using a mix of mobile devices and the necessary infrastructure.”
But there’s a lot more to getting the formula right for a successful migration to the cloud and enabling a remote workforce, says Harris. Microsoft solutions are a powerful set of tools – Softlanding is a Microsoft Gold Partner – but it’s easy to overlook change management during sudden pivots to a new system or organizational structure. Change management is a collective term for all approaches to prepare, support, and help individuals, teams, and organizations in making organizational change. Unfortunately, it’s been like pulling teeth for most of the industry to diversify its workforce and hiring pipelines. Harris says the change management space could use more women to help spur these types of changes internally.
“I think that there’s a lot of opportunity within the space for women, especially when it comes to guiding how this change can happen within organizations,” Harris said. “Technology is only part of the puzzle. There is a big component to the change management aspect of being able to work in a transformed workplace. Things like adoption planning and communication plans, and finding out ways to teach people how to adopt technologies within the organizations.”
