FACILITYCalgary

 

 

August 5, 2014

 

Her mom, a homemaker. Dad, a plumber/pipefitter in Goose Bay. Eldest child, she has a sister and step-brother. She did her K-12 (valedictorian and athlete of the year) in home town Roberts Arm, Newfoundland (pop. 1,300) .

 

She studied journalism at Stephenville Community College, worked for the local french language newspaper. Published poetry. She came here, fell in love with Calgary, "a place to make dreams and opportunities a reality".

 

Published poet. Fisherman. Bilingual. Leader. Advocate. Activist. Lobbyist. Mom.

 

Complexity.

 

Tows a boat.

 

We ripped through her resume milestones – she’s done a lot, each step building to her current billet – research and service advisor to public sector clients, knitting problems together with a 1,000-subject team of experts addressing tech issues for government and education sector clients at her day job.

 

Driven, achiever. At Gartner where she advises major public sector accounts, she’s in the Top 300 globally in sales achievement again this year (she was #1 in sales for new-hires in Canada for 2013 out of 200+ Gartner), she says it isn’t just about dream-trips award winners get to take, but her long-standing drive to achieve and excel. 

 

Arranging interviews with busy people like Terri (Terri-Lynn) Snow is a schedule and travel nightmare – in this case, a doubly-busy person who runs a busy career at Gartner by day and also leads Calgary’s premier technology organization – Calgary Council for Advanced Technology - to boot. Our schedules collided early one morning in that temple of coffee and questionable food – corner table at a Tim Horton’s – where she held court and this scribe struggled to keep up with my note taking, as zigs and zags of her own career intersected with what she wanted to talk about bumped into my questions. She insisted on Tetley Tea (the Newfie non-alcoholic beverage of choice) … and admonished Red Rose.

 

Her personal cause célèbre is quite obviously women-in-technology. Terri’s passion for women’s issues in her industry doesn’t seem to distract her from the main cause – advocate for her organization, for her industry. She’s particularly proud of a current initiative – Corporate Capacity Building For Women (funded by $300,000 grant they won) – which augments already stellar work that CCAT has been doing. What is CCAT’s essence? “CCAT bridges the gap between business and technology professionals who might never meet, to accelerate commercialization. Calgary has the largest number of tech start-ups per-capita in Canada”. 

 

I’ve been on CCAT’s mailing list for many years – they regularly push out notices of events, news, seminars and demonstrate there is an active voice for technology start-ups, entrepreneurs and struggling baby-companies. Meeting CCAT’s current leader – someone who works for a massive global leader in its technology niche - seems such an appropriate fit.

 

While Terri wanted to focus our discussion on advocating for CCAT and telling me all about Gartner, I was more interested in what makes Terri tick. Her goal – to partner women in their organization with companies, with mentors – promoting success in technology for women.

 

Terri tells me there are four pillars to CCAT: energy, environment, ICT and life science. Seems to me there is a fifth pillar – Terri Snow. 

 

Terri came to Calgary in 1991 for a summer job at a Greyhound call centre on a one-way $125 ticket.

 

She stayed.

 

Lucky us.