Enterprise Finalists

Andrew Cree is the Chief Information Officer at Canada Cartage, leading technology in a complex North American transportation & logistics environment. Known for his accountability, humility, and outcomes-driven approach, he aligns technology investments with business priorities to deliver practical, scalable value. Under his leadership, IT has become a trusted business partner—improving reliability, enabling data-driven decisions, and enhancing efficiency. He brings a balanced, responsible approach to innovation while fostering a strong, collaborative team culture.

Transformed IT at Canada Cartage from a support function into a true business partner by setting clear expectations and building a culture of accountability and ownership. Built a high-performing team focused on business outcomes, improving system and core application uptime to ~99.9% and reducing operational disruptions. Strengthened cybersecurity and governance to lower risk and improve compliance. Led modernization and automation efforts to improve productivity, service consistency, and speed of decision-making. By embedding IT into the business, we shifted from reactive support to a trusted partner that helps drive growth, resilience, and better customer outcomes.

Janet Lin is Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at EQ Bank, where she leads enterprise technology strategy, AI and innovation, cloud infrastructure, data platforms, and cybersecurity. She drives the bank’s digital transformation and competitive advantage as Canada’s Challenger Bank. A recognized leader in AI and technology, Janet has advanced enterprise-wide adoption of AI, modernized core platforms, and strengthened operational resilience to enable scalable growth and enhanced customer experience.

Under Janet Lin’s leadership, EQ Bank’s technology organization has delivered transformative outcomes that directly advance the bank’s strategy as Canada’s Challenger Bank. She has strengthened the foundation of EQ Bank by modernizing core technology, data, and AI platforms—enabling growth, faster innovation, and improved operational resilience. Janet established the enterprise AI foundation through the AI Centre of Excellence and is scaling adoption through an AI Factory model, driving measurable productivity and innovation. Her team is also leading the technology integration for the PC Financial acquisition, ensuring a seamless, secure transition while unlocking new capabilities and value across customers, and operations.

Ali Razavi is Chief Information Officer at 407 ETR, leading IT and enterprise data & analytics to enable growth, customer experience, and operational excellence. He is focused on transforming IT and data into strategic drivers of business value through digital, AI, and modernization initiatives. Previously, Ali served as CIO at Scotiabank, overseeing technology for Retail, Commercial Banking, and Wealth Management across Canada.

In my first year as CIO at 407 ETR, I focused on strengthening the team and building a technology foundation to enable the business to operate effectively and scale for growth. Together, we modernized the customer journey through digital onboarding and self-service, improved reliability through platform and infrastructure transformation, and established enterprise data and AI capabilities to support more intelligent, personalized engagement. What I’m most proud of is how the team embraced this change—elevating our culture and capabilities, and positioning us to continuously innovate and redefine the customer experience.

Alicia Samuel an accomplished and driven senior IT executive with over 29 years of experience. Alicia, serves as a member of the CAMH Foundation Board of Directors and serves on the Pro Action Cops and Kids Peel Chapter council. In her spare time, Alicia participates and speaks at women in leadership events and guest speaks at the University of Toronto, Scarborough campus on Digital Technology. She champions for women in IT.

Modernizing the way of work is critical for an IT Organizations success in supporting and creating value for our stakeholders. Specifically, in the foundational dependencies that hinder progress such as; infrastructure, networking, software applications and hardware portfolio management. As we work through our multi-year IT modernization journey, my team focused on using IT management and governance methodologies to increase maturity, optimize IT operational costs, increase efficiency and improve stakeholder experience that reflected a better trusted advisor relationship between IT and our stakeholders. This is measured annually in our IT satisfaction survey. The team has done amazing work on this journey.

Dhaksayan Shanmuganayagam is Chief Information Officer of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), North America's third-largest public transit agency. Having started his career at the TTC as a university co-op student, he now leads the organization's enterprise technology strategy, digital transformation, and cybersecurity. His work focuses on using data, artificial intelligence, and modern digital platforms to improve transit operations, strengthen organizational resilience, and enhance the customer experience.

As Chief Information Officer of the Toronto Transit Commission, I have transformed IT from a traditional support function into a strategic business partner driving enterprise-wide digital transformation. My team enabled remote work for more than 6,000 employees during the pandemic, restored critical services within four days following a major cybersecurity incident, modernized the TTC's digital core, and is pioneering AI-enabled Digital Twin capabilities to improve transit planning and operations. By aligning technology with business strategy, we are strengthening organizational resilience, improving service reliability, enhancing the customer experience, and helping shape the future of public transit.

Brad Strom is Chief Information Officer at York University, one of Canada's largest universities, where he leads technology strategy, cybersecurity, digital transformation, and the responsible adoption of AI. A recognized leader in AI and innovation, he has guided large-scale modernization across the higher education, energy, and financial services sectors. Previously Vice President and CIO at SaskPower, he is known for building high-performing teams and delivering dependable, cost-effective technology that advances institutional priorities and serves communities.

When I joined York University, its digital ecosystem was struggling to meet quickly evolving demands. We rebuilt the foundation, overhauling the data centre, strengthening identity and access management, and deploying next-generation security. With that stability in place, we turned to opportunity: migrating workloads to the cloud, introducing AI-assisted software development across six teams, and launching YU AURA, our award-winning no-code AI platform now supporting over 30 use cases across the university. We did all of this while reducing our operating budget by roughly 20 percent, and strengthened the team, earning a leadership score of 4.09 out of 5.0.