Mike Holownych
I lead the people and processes that keep business-critical services recoverable when they fail.
If you are hiring for technology operations or service delivery leadership, you likely need someone who has carried monitoring, major incidents, vendors, and operating resources, and who stays close enough to the work to judge what will hold under pressure.
Evidence: TMX Group, BMO, BlackBerry, and independent AI systems work
Seeking a senior technology operations or service delivery leadership role in Canada. Also open to related DevSecOps and AI engineering leadership mandates where operational discipline is central.
Leadership scope
These roles show the scope I have held. Team size and budget figures describe responsibility, not marketing claims.
TMX Group
Led a unified L1 Monitoring and Major Incident Management team through three team leads. Accountable for escalations, executive communications, and developing team leads for broader incident responsibilities. Scope covered monitoring and major incident operations. It did not include infrastructure ownership.
The team had 17 people when I joined and 14 after two support teams were consolidated following CDS Post Trade Modernization. That change amalgamated monitoring and major incident work into one operating team. It is not presented here as a cost-savings achievement.
BMO Financial Group
As Senior Manager, led 9 FTE systems administrators and 10 contract resources supporting corporate, finance, and financial-crimes technology across cloud and on-premises environments. Managed an approximately CAD $1.6 million annual operating budget, including salaries and overtime, with contract and vendor operations responsibilities.
Budget ownership meant prioritizing staffing and overtime against service needs, and negotiating and managing TCS and HCL staff-augmentation contracts, renewals, and performance escalations.
BlackBerry
As Global IT Service Manager, service owner for a global email service with a 99.999% availability SLA. Accountable for service continuity, incident and problem management, vendor coordination, and production change governance within that portfolio. Earlier, led a NOC team of 9 direct reports.
Service ownership meant final production-change authority within the assigned portfolio and accountability for continuity of that customer-facing global email service. It does not describe every BlackBerry product line.
How I approach the work
Supported examples of responsibility and judgment. These are not hypothetical case studies.
Unifying monitoring and major incident work through organizational change
- Context
- At TMX Group, monitoring and major incident responsibilities needed to operate as one team after CDS Post Trade Modernization consolidated two support groups.
- Responsibility
- As Manager, IT Operations and Incident Response, I led the unified L1 Monitoring and Major Incident Management team through three team leads, with accountability for escalations and executive communications.
- What I did
- I brought the amalgamated team onto one operating model, designed and documented an incident management process across TMX businesses and subsidiaries (including Trayport) covering all severity levels, and led integration of ServiceNow Major Incident Management with Google Workspace automation that creates a dedicated Chat space and Meet bridge for each incident troubleshooting team.
- Verified result
- The verified outcome is the operating model and tooling put in place: a single monitoring and major-incident team, a documented cross-business incident process, and ServiceNow MIM integration with automated collaboration bridges. Team size moved from 17 to 14 through amalgamation. That figure reflects organizational consolidation, not a performance metric.
Balancing people, vendors, and a defined operating budget
- Context
- At BMO, corporate, finance, and financial-crimes technology needed sustained support across AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments with a mix of employees and contracted capacity.
- Responsibility
- As Senior Manager, Technology Support, I led 9 FTE Linux and Windows administrators and 10 TCS and HCL contract resources, and managed an approximately CAD $1.6 million annual operating budget including salaries and overtime.
- What I did
- I negotiated and managed TCS and HCL contracts for after-hours staff augmentation, covering five resources per supplier under fixed-price and time-and-materials arrangements. I managed renewals, resource counts, SLA and KPI reviews, and performance escalations. I also held production change approval authority within assigned scope and owned related control attestations.
- Verified result
- The verified scope is people leadership across employees and contractors, active vendor and contract operations, and budget accountability at the stated scale. That is useful evidence of how I weigh service needs against staffing and commercial constraints.
Applying operational discipline to automation that had to be adopted
- Context
- Earlier at BMO, online banking needed repeatable automation for environments that moved through QA, performance, UAT, and production. One-off scripts were not enough.
- Responsibility
- As Team Lead for Online Banking discretionary application projects, I led analysts and DBAs supporting releases across 11 non-production environments and coordinated through production deployment and warranty.
- What I did
- I built Ansible playbooks and Ansible Automation Platform Configuration as Code for an Event-Driven Ansible implementation that began as a Red Hat proof of concept and was adopted across the online banking infrastructure footprint, with QA validation before managing QA, performance, UAT, and production environments.
- Verified result
- The verified result is adoption of that automation approach across the online banking infrastructure footprint, plus technical readiness sign-off at applicable release gates. That shows operational thinking applied to automation. It is not a claim about enterprise-wide AI delivery.
Where this maps to your mandate
If you are hiring for a senior operations or service delivery mandate, these are the needs my experience most directly addresses.
Leading an operations or production-support team
TMX monitoring and major-incident team leadership through team leads; BMO Senior Manager leadership of 9 FTE and 10 contract resources; earlier BlackBerry NOC team leadership of 9 direct reports.
Clarifying ownership and escalation
Documented incident management process across TMX businesses and severity levels; BMO production change approval authority within assigned scope; BlackBerry service ownership with final change authority in portfolio.
Coordinating major incident response
TMX Incident Lead for P1 and P2 incidents (excluding Trayport), including technical recovery coordination and executive updates; ServiceNow MIM integration; earlier major-incident facilitation at BMO.
Managing service delivery, vendors, and resources
BMO CAD $1.6M operating budget with TCS and HCL contract management; TMX people leadership through amalgamation; BlackBerry vendor coordination for a global email service.
Evaluating practical opportunities for automation
BMO Ansible Automation Platform work adopted across online banking infrastructure; independent Nexus Code and Homelab AI (FOSS); Citable (Apache-2.0 evidence layer); Nebula Components (commercial diagnostic service with bounded claims).
Independent technical work
Independent technical work I build and operate. Nexus Code and Homelab AI are open source (FOSS) and not commercial products as they stand. Citable is Apache-2.0 FOSS. Nebula Components is a live commercial diagnostic service with explicit evidence boundaries. None of these replace the employment record for enterprise operations leadership.
Nexus Code
Operational question: how can an agentic coding tool make its actions reviewable instead of hiding them behind a single permission switch?
Project notesHomelab AI
Operational question: how do you treat self-hosted inference like an operable system (desired state, validation evidence, and rollback) when you are the only operator?
Project notesNebula Components
Operational question: how do you diagnose observable landing-page conversion friction with evidence-backed findings, without promising lift?
Project notesCitable
Operational question: how do you make SEO, AEO, and GEO audit findings defensible by binding them to evidence, change control, and explicit unknowns?
Project notes
Writing
Clarifying pieces for hiring conversations. Published only after a written quality gate.
Budget, vendors, and service support as one leadership job
At BMO, people, a CAD $1.6M operating budget, and vendor contracts were one decision set. This is how that responsibility looked without the slogan layer.
Read articleWhat monitoring and major incident leadership covered at TMX
A mandate note for hiring managers: what L1 monitoring and major incident leadership included at TMX, what it excluded, and where the operating friction actually was.
Read articleWhat my independent AI projects show, and what they do not
Nexus Code and Homelab AI are open-source (FOSS) projects on an operations foundation. This note draws the evidence line for hiring managers, including what is under re-evaluation.
Read article
How the pieces connect
My foundation is enterprise technology operations and service delivery across capital markets, financial services, and telecommunications at TMX Group, BMO, and BlackBerry. Independent technical work extends that foundation: Nexus Code and Homelab AI (FOSS), Citable (Apache-2.0 FOSS), and Nebula Components (a commercial landing-page diagnostic service). I am seeking a senior technology operations or service delivery leadership role in Canada. I am also open to DevSecOps or AI engineering leadership mandates where the same operational discipline applies.
Discuss the role you need filled
If you are hiring for senior technology operations or service delivery leadership, and you need someone who has carried monitoring, major incidents, people, vendors, and operating resources, I would welcome a conversation about the team you are building, the services it supports, and the responsibilities you need the next leader to hold.