About

I lead enterprise data and AI transformations at Deloitte, where I am a Senior Manager in Technology and Transformation. Most of the programs I am handed are already behind. Working out what actually went wrong, saying so plainly to the people who can act on it, and then delivering the thing — that is most of the job.

I started in Lagos in 2012, supporting ERP systems at Huawei. That is an unglamorous way into technology and a very good one. When a system breaks at four in the afternoon, nobody wants a framework. They want it working, and they want to know why it broke. I have carried that bias ever since.

Toronto came next, then Ottawa: ERP consulting at Abaster, then running ERP and business solutions at Nortec. Those years were about scope — learning how sales, procurement, production, finance and warehousing actually connect, and how rarely the diagram matches the building. I moved into consulting properly at KPMG in 2018, and to Deloitte in 2021.

Somewhere in the middle of that I went back to school, which I do not entirely recommend doing while working. I took a Master of Economics at Carleton, and then a PhD in Digital Transformation and Innovation at the University of Ottawa, which I defended. The dissertation asks how organisations turn data into a service other organisations will pay for. Four years, three peer-reviewed papers, one problem.

The research changed how I work. Transformation programs fail in patterns, and the patterns are documented. Most of what goes wrong on a large program has gone wrong before, somewhere else, in print. Knowing that makes the diagnosis faster and the conversation shorter.

The work now is mostly at the top of programs rather than inside them: steering committees, reporting to CIOs and their boards, teams of up to thirty across several countries and time zones. The technical detail still matters — you cannot tell a steering committee a program is recoverable unless you know why — but the harder part is usually getting a room of senior people to agree on what is actually true before deciding what to do about it.

I teach management information systems part-time at Telfer, and I mentor through the Vector Institute, where I also sit on the applied adjudication committee. Teaching keeps me honest. It is difficult to hide behind vocabulary in front of a room of students who have not yet learned to be polite about it.

I speak at events and guest series, and have done since 2017. Most recently at the STEM Women Congress in Montreal, on what the AI era actually changes for people and teams, which is less than the marketing suggests and more than most organisations have planned for.

I also read, and I have written up what I read since December 2016 — what I loved, what I did not, and who I think should bother. That archive is the most honest thing on this site. It was never written for an audience.