IBM Skills Academy

Colette Lacroix

IBM

Colette Lacroix is the Industry Executive for Higher Education of IBM’s Public Sector Canada. Her role as the Industry Lead for Colleges and Universities is to assist in setting the IBM strategic direction to support Higher Education Institutions in Canada.Colette Lacroix was born and educated in Ottawa and she is a Graduate of the University of Ottawa with a Bachelor in Social Sciences and Criminology.Her career started as a Public Servant working in the Federal Government in the Departments of Correctional Services, Energy Mines and Resources and Revenue Canada. Her career moved to the Private Sector to work in the Technology Industry for such organizations as Ventura Software a Xerox Company, Apple Canada, AT&T Solutions and NCR Canada. Over 20 years ago, she joined IBM as the Solution Manager for Business Intelligence for IBM Canada.Ms. Lacroix has taken on many Business Development and Sales roles for IBM to help develop markets and solution areas such as Business Intelligence, CRM and eBusiness. Over the past 18 years Ms. Lacroix has worked with Higher Education, Research and Healthcare organization in Canada. Her role has been in business development and the creation of strategic collaboration. In 2014, Colette Lacroix underwent a Harvard University process and was certified as an IBM Global Thought Leader for Education and Executive Client Management.Some of her key accomplishments are the development and integration of the long term Technology Alliance Agreement with the University of Ottawa, Carleton University, St. Lawrence College, the creation of the Center of Business Analytics and Performance Management at the Telfer School of Management, The inclusion of the Higher Education Institutions in the newly announced April 2012 IBM Research and Development Collaborator, The Ontario Research in Electronic Commerce, MUSES, CORALCea the first Care Path Management Solution at the Ottawa Hospital, the development of the Watson Development Center at the Center of Advance Computing at Queen’s University.Today, Colette is seeking new challenges with IBM to continue supporting Higher Education and the development of Skills around Analytics, Cognitive and Cloud. Today’s challenge is the creation and support of the Academic Cloud through the Virtual Computing Cloud strategy in Canada that demonstrate shared services across many Universities such as the current BCNet, Cybera Cloud, the Ontario Research and Education Virtual Computing Cloud, which is a consortium comprised of La Cité collégiale, Algonquin College, The University of Ottawa and Carleton University and the Compute Canada Digital Research Strategy.