Independent advisory for organizations whose infrastructure crosses the lines between real estate, facilities, workplace, EHS, and IT. We assess what you have. We design what you need. We oversee the work to make it real. And we sell nothing else.
A data center move is also a real estate decision. A building renovation is also a network design. A security posture is also an EHS posture. The hardest problems live in the seams between disciplines — and that is the work Dataflow Management has been doing since 1998.
We are privately held and entirely independent. We take no commissions, hold no vendor relationships, and resell nothing. The recommendation is the only thing we have to defend, and our clients pay us precisely because of that.
We work with firms in construction, education, technology, insurance, law, manufacturing, and private equity — and the people who hire us are usually CFOs, CIOs, COOs, heads of real estate or workplace, and the operators who answer to them.
From 2007 through early 2026 the firm ran a dedicated APAC arm out of Hong Kong, anchoring engagements across the region. The Massachusetts office remains the firm’s home.
We organize the work into five overlapping practices. Most engagements draw on more than one.
Site selection through a technical lens. Base building and tenant systems. Tel/data and structured cabling. Lab, clean-room, and specialty environments. Workplace strategy that accounts for what the wires and the walls actually need to do over the next ten years.
Networks and data centers, building and process automation, security, back-office platforms, application portfolios, and the data substrate underneath them. Our proprietary multi-layer assessment is a structured walk from the physical plant up through systems, applications, and policy, and back down again, because most of the failures we find started somewhere they weren’t expected.
Environmental, health, and safety. Regulatory remediation. Business continuity and disaster recovery. Audit response. The work overlaps more than people realize: a building that fails an EHS review usually fails its resilience review, and the same root causes show up in both.
Pre-close due diligence on IT, facilities, and real estate. Day-one and integration planning. Post-deal rationalization of the systems, leases, and contracts you suddenly own twice. We have done this work on both sides of the table — for acquirers and for the acquired.
RFC, RFI, RFQ, RFP. Vendor selection and management. Pricing, terms, and renegotiation. Ongoing oversight through delivery. The unglamorous work that quietly saves clients more money than anything else on this list.
Three movements, in that order. We don’t skip the first one, and we don’t leave before the last one is finished.
We start with the building, the racks, the cabling, the contracts, the people, and the policies. Not the org chart. Most assessments fail because they trust the documentation; ours trusts the floor.
We design to the constraints we found, in your language, against your budget, with full traceability between requirement, decision, and cost. No vendor reference architectures dressed up as recommendations.
We stay through procurement, implementation, and acceptance. The hand-off is to your operating team, not to a successor consultant. We are accountable for the result, not just the document.
Tom founded Dataflow Management in 1998 after running global operations and infrastructure at Macromedia, Allaire, and Hitachi. He has spent more than thirty years working at the intersection of the buildings, sites, and people of large institutions and the technology that runs underneath them, first inside a global semiconductor manufacturer, then inside two software companies that grew through acquisition, and since then on behalf of clients across a dozen industries.
The firm reflects what he learned in those roles: that the hardest infrastructure problems live where the systems meet the walls, the regulations, and the people. That conviction is what drew the practice toward facilities, workplace, and EHS work alongside the original IT mandate.
For new engagements, references, or a confidential conversation about a problem you’re working on, get in touch.