Thomas L. Marsh
Thirty-plus years working at the intersection of technology, facilities, and the people who depend on both. Founder of Dataflow Management.
Where the work has gone.
The original Dataflow mandate was infrastructure broadly, the systems, buildings, and operating environments that growing organizations depend on, with attention to the seams between them. Over time, the engagements that drew the firm, and that drew Tom personally, kept landing on the boundary between what the systems wanted and what the building, the lease, or the regulator allowed.
Today the practice tilts toward the work that crosses those boundaries: real estate and workplace engineering, facilities advisory, EHS and resilience, and the technology infrastructure that has to live alongside all of it. Most clients still arrive with what looks like an IT problem; most of those problems turn out to have a facilities, lease, or compliance dimension that no one had drawn into the room.
The current focus is a continuation of the career arc, not a pivot. The first decade of the work was inside semiconductor manufacturing, where the line between technology and physical plant doesn’t exist. The second was inside two software companies whose growth was paced by their data centers and their offices. The third has been outside, advising firms that face the same problem from a different angle.
A short version of a long story.
Tom’s career began at Medical and Technical Research Associates, a Boston-area contract research organization, supporting laboratory and clinical research infrastructure under FDA regulation. From there he joined the global Hitachi business, working across Hitachi Semiconductor America (later divested into Renesas and Elpida), Hitachi America, and Hitachi Canada. The work was field-office infrastructure for divisions whose products ranged from memory chips to construction equipment to broadcast television, all of them dependent on factories, fabs, and offices that had to function on a global clock.
He moved next to Allaire Corp, which was acquired by Macromedia during his tenure. At Macromedia he served as Senior Director, Global Enterprise Engineering, with end-to-end accountability for global infrastructure during the company’s most rapid growth period. The most visible piece of that work was the platform behind global software distribution — the system that put the Flash player on roughly 98% of internet-connected desktops at the time. The less visible piece was the steady mechanical work of running data centers, picking real estate, and keeping the company’s costs in line as it scaled.
Dataflow Management was founded in 1998, and Tom turned it into a full-time consulting practice in 2002, after Macromedia. The firm is based in Massachusetts and has worked across North America, Europe, and Asia, with a dedicated APAC arm running out of Hong Kong from 2007 through early 2026. Engagements have spanned construction, education, technology, insurance, law, manufacturing, and private equity.
- 2002 – present Dataflow Management Principal Consultant — independent advisory practice serving higher education, research, life sciences, technology, enterprise, and municipal clients. Andover, MA.
- 2007 – 2026 Dataflow Management (Hong Kong) Principal Consultant — representative office and home base for the firm’s APAC client engagements. Hong Kong · Travel-based from Andover, MA.
- 1999 – 2002 Macromedia, Inc. Senior Director, Global Enterprise Engineering — global real estate, infrastructure, and IT during the company’s most rapid growth period. Boston · San Francisco. Subsequently merged with Adobe.
- 1994 – 1999 Hitachi America, Ltd. and Hitachi Canada, Ltd. North American Field Office Network Manager — real estate, facility infrastructure, and mission-critical technology for Hitachi Semiconductor and other Hitachi divisions across North America.
- 1992 – 1994 Medical and Technical Research Associates (CRO) Network Administrator — FDA-regulated pharmaceutical research infrastructure, supporting laboratory and clinical research operations. Boston, MA.
In touch.
For an introduction, a reference, or a confidential conversation about a problem you’re working on:
tom.marsh@dataflowmgmt.com
LinkedIn — Thomas Marsh
Firm contact details