About

I'm a technology executive, available now for a full-time, interim or contract role, or an engagement. Toronto.

I came up through engineering, sales and banking technology. Design engineer, then software sales and consulting at ReadSoft, then product and technology roles in Frankfurt, London and Toronto: DVB Bank, Barclays Capital, Deutsche Bank, RBC and nine years at Scotiabank, from its first public-cloud platform to the product operating model and the financials behind $1B of technology spend.

The pattern in the work is the same each time. Find what the organisation is actually selling, to whom, and what it costs to deliver. Put that in front of the people who own the money. Fix roles, responsibilities and priorities so the people involved stop competing and start compounding. Then own the result.

In 2025 I joined Black & McDonald, a construction, utilities and facilities company, as Director, Business Integration, reporting to the CIO, to learn an industry I didn't know from the inside and design for it. The output was the enterprise IT strategy: technology managed as complete, product-managed services aligned to business capabilities. I chaired the AI governance committee, established the architecture review committee, ran Microsoft 365 Copilot training across the business, and worked on the pole intelligence project. I left in November 2026 knowing how digital facilities management, digital construction and digital utilities (poles, streetlights, traffic signals) are run, which banks never taught me.

Seamus Birch Solutions is my consulting company. The Scotiabank and RBC work ran through it, as did the product strategy work for Puppet, GitHub and Synopsys. Since 2024 I've used it to build my own software with teams of AI agents, under AITLA; technologyDo is where that work lives. SigmaScope, a portfolio platform for advisors, was built that way, and so was this site and www.christmasdownunder.com. Strategy Go is capability-based costing for banks, utilities and government, with Omar Shakil, who ran Product Finance at Scotiabank while I ran Product Management.

From performance reviews: "Navigates organisational and political boundaries with ease." "Excels at indirect management techniques." "Manages tasks with panache."

MBA, AGSM (UNSW and University of Sydney) with Manchester Business School. BE (Hons) Mechanical and Space Engineering, University of Queensland. PMP. Co-author in Peritoneal Dialysis International, 2002.