A leader in the move for strong women in STEM – SSC’s Yana Hof is moving to Enterprise Architecture

We do not often do profiles on specific employees. However, Yana Hof has consistently shown what it takes to go above and beyond to support her clients. On April 1, 2022, Yana became the Director General (DG) for the Enterprise Architecture (EA) Directorate and said goodbye to her role as DG, SSC Client Executive for the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). With over 30 years of experience in the public service, Yana has earned the respect of her peers, and the trust of the clients she serves. 

In 2019, Yana led the implementation of an Agile/Bi Modal pilot for key pathfinder cloud projects for the CRA. This pilot focused on face-to-face discussions and exploring different ways to work together. Yana knows that unexpected challenges are all too common in complex and interconnected IT environments. With this in mind, Yana proved that SSC could adapt the way in which we work collaboratively with our partners to be more aligned with emerging trends in IT solution design.

Yana was key in leading SSC’s support for CRA’s most recent tax season. With six successful tax seasons under her belt, Yana has shown time and again that being prepared is the surest path to success. 

To prepare for this past tax season, Yana oversaw the setup of over 32 control rooms to ensure that everything went smoothly. Each control room had over 126 virtual participants from all across the country. Both SSC and CRA employees were on these calls, collaborating and sharing key data to troubleshoot if problems came up. Yana also led the rebuild of the CRA infrastructure, which helped to quadruple the daily support intake of the CRA portals from 1 million daily logins to 4 million. This is no small feat on its own, but this massive rebuild was done in a two-week period. In a time where supply shortages are increasingly an issue, this required an incredible amount of coordination between vendor, client and SSC resources, to deliver in such a tight timeframe. With another smooth tax season having just been completed, Yana will be the first to tell you, that this is a result of the incredible people she works with.

My staff are my extended family. You grow up with them, but now it’s time to leave the nest. This is the hardest part about moving on.

SSC recognizes the importance of women in Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, or STEM. SSC celebrated International Women’s Day just over a month ago, but strives to advance the careers of women in STEM all year round. This move further demonstrates that SSC is truly looking to build internally and is actively promoting women in key leadership positions for the future of SSC.

In an increasingly digital era, the demand for complex IT solutions is growing, and Yana will be there to meet those demands for SSC. Yana’s background, experience and knowledge will be instrumental as she builds on the future SSC infrastructure, to further develop the EA function for SSC. We are very excited to have Yana take on such an important position within the SSC team.