About

I am Michael Halbrook, a permanent deacon of the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois and the founder of Ad Alta Leadership and Domus Formation, Inc.

For thirty years I worked in media, marketing, and technology - the last eighteen of them at Adobe, most recently as Director of Adobe on Adobe Consulting. I've been a leader on consulting, and in Adobe's own efforts to maximize its own adoption of its own solutions. Midway through my time at Adobe, I took two years away to work on mission as Chief Operating Officer at Exodus 90.

I left Adobe in May of 2026.

What I found when I turned toward Catholic institutions was a gap I had not expected. The missions are serious. The people are capable and working hard. And the systems underneath them are, almost without exception, a generation behind what a mid-sized business would consider ordinary.

Donor data that cannot be joined to sacramental records. Parish systems that do not talk to diocesan ones. Development offices running on exports. Nobody at fault - this is simply what happens when institutions buy software one problem at a time over twenty years, without anyone holding the whole picture.

That gap is what Ad Alta exists to close.

The technology is the visible part. But a data platform nobody uses is worse than no platform, so the practice covers the other two pillars as well: whether an institution is clear about what it is for, and whether it can make a decision and have it hold. Those three things fail together and they have to be fixed together.

I write Ad Alta Weekly, a free Monday note on Church, mission, and technology. My pastoral writing, homilies, and essays are at deaconmichael.net.