Laura Nathanson

Ms. Nathanson serves as a member of the Management Team in the San Francisco Office. In her role as Capability Lead, she is currently developing thought leadership around the strategic role HR can play in retention. She co-creates the office’s Learning and Development plans. Laura led the San Francisco office for four months during the OMVP’s sabbatical, and is a successful project and team leader across multiple clients, disciplines and industries.

Ms. Nathanson joined Avanade as a Senior Business Architect with expertise in SharePoint. As her career developed, she was soon recognized for her ability to quickly understand the root causes of client relationship and delivery issues, find clear solutions, and successfully turn around troubled projects. Her curiosity led her to take on other roles, such as Test Lead, UX Designer, Information Architect and Solutions Architect.

Laura eventually joined Avanade Advisory, where she developed offerings, sold and delivered strategy engagements focused on improving employee and customer experiences. Due to her wide variety of experiences and competencies, she was affectionately dubbed “the Swiss Army Knife of consultants.”

Ms. Nathanson was brought on to complete the migration and adoption of local office Intranets on SharePoint 2003, to a regional Intranet on SharePoint 2007 (MOSS). She took an expansive view of change enablement, writing a short position paper on the Six Principles of Intranet Adoption that she presented at a Boye & Company conference in 2010.

One of Laura’s Six Principles was to use the Intranet for important, frequent work. To that end, she built a solution to automate regional HR onboarding, a cross-functional process across multiple departments (IT, Facilities, HR, Marketing, Payroll). She also revised the information architecture of the Intranet, developed training plans for Intranet users, and redesigned the IT and home pages to improve the user experience. She helped content owners to migrate their information and prepare their local Intranet servers for decommissioning. Her efforts were recognized as "increasing adoption exponentially."