Extended Biography—Ephrem Kebede Bartolomeos

Ephrem Kebede Bartolomeos is an IT professional with more than thirty years of experience in enterprise software development and maintenance, including twenty years and counting working as an IT business analyst. He is the maker of WholeTEAM.

Born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Ephrem came to America in 1986, at the age of nineteen, to pursue his college education, with his father's financial support for the first year of his college attendance. He had graduated from St. Joseph School Addis Ababa as co–valedictorian the previous year, a school he had attended starting from kindergarten, and had just spent a gap year in Nairobi, Kenya and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the latter where his father was working at the time.

Upon arriving in the United States, he attended Inver Hills Community College in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota before transferring in 1989 to the University of Minnesota Duluth on a partial scholarship. He worked all types of odd jobs to put himself through college.

His first job, in the fall of 1987, was as a hotel houseman at the Holiday Inn in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota. He graduated from the University of Minnesota Duluth with honors with a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science in May 1992 and began his career as a software engineer the following month. His first job was with West Publishing Company in Eagan, Minnesota where he worked as a programmer and gradually as a technical lead. At West, he was a member of the PREMISE Research Software team developing a COTS desktop software for performing search, retrieval, and presentation of court case data that has been published on CD-ROMs for use by small and mid-size law firms.

In August 1995 he met his future wife and his soul mate, Sara.

In January 1996 he left West Publishing and moved east to Stamford, Connecticut to join a college friend in a new venture. He continued to work as a programmer for the next four years, followed by four years working as a software development manager, the role he was in when he conceived WholeTEAM.

In the summer of 2003, by then married and with children, he moved to Northern Virginia and settled there.

From 2004 to 2006 he worked as an IT project manager and a business analyst.

In August 2006, in light of WholeTEAM, he made the consequential decision to be an IT business analyst, an IT professional facilitating requirements—or, to be more precise, an IT professional facilitating requirements definition and management (RDM)—and became one. Requirements, or RDM, is one of the five main activities of enterprise software development and maintenance (ESDM,) one of the five main activities of DevOps, and is in his opinion the hardest and the most crucial activity in software development. He has remained one to this day.

At the same time, he made WholeTEAM.

He hopes everyone finds it useful for making a great product, a product that meets business needs well.

Way back in 1991 Ephrem had the opportunity to be part of a ten-week NSF-funded summer undergraduate research assistants (SURA) program at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) where he was exposed to research on AI, working on a probabilistic inference engine under Professor Kalman. Currently he is an enthusiastic user of tools that leverage AI, such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and others for his work and personal purposes.

He feels as humans it is imperative that we do not relinquish our sovereignty over the tools and the technologies we make or use — especially our sovereignty over AI and over AI tools — lest we relinquish our sovereignty over our own selves.

He believes it takes the whole team, including oneself if and only if oneself is a member of the product team, to make a great product.

Finally, he is deeply grateful for all who played a vital role in the making of WholeTEAM. He is especially forever grateful for his beloved wife Sara and their dear children Rebka and Amanuel. WholeTEAM could not have happened without their support.

He dedicates WholeTEAM to Sara, Rebka, and Amanuel – – and Lexi.

Ephrem lives in Virginia with his wife Sara. They have two grown children. When he's not walking furry member of the family Lexi, for leisure he likes to read, travel, and hike. Golf is on his to-try list.

Ephrem Kebede Bartolomeos

31 August 2026

Sterling, Virginia, United States