Extended Biography—Ephrem Bartolomeos

EPHREM BARTOLOMEOS is an IT business analyst 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 Kebede 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, leaving behind his birth country—a country that was in the midst of a long civil war with present–day Eritrea, and a country that was being ruled by the Derg, a brutal, dictatorial regime—for a better future. He had graduated from St. Joseph School Addis Ababa as co–valedictorian the previous year, a private 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 with a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science in 1992 and began his career. His first job as a software engineer 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 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 legal firms. Developed in C++, he was the technical lead for the middleware component responsible for receiving search queries from the end user, querying the backend, caching the result set, and passing the results to the user interface layer via a West-developed communication protocol named Westpro. He was a member of the team that shipped version 2.1 of the tool for both Windows and Macintosh platforms.

In August 1995 he met his future wife, 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 and Sara moved their young family south 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 specializing in requirements—or, to be more precise, an IT professional specializing in requirements definition and management (RDM,) one of the five main activities of enterprise software development and maintenance (ESDM,) one of the five main activities of DevOps, and in his opinion the hardest and the most crucial activity in software development—and became one. And he has remained one to this day.

At the same time, he made WholeTEAM.

Currently he works for a major IT consulting and technology services company as a consultant providing hands-on requirements support on an IT modernization project at a Washington, D.C.-based international organization client.

He also teaches WholeTEAM.

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 — especially our sovereignty over AI and over AI tools — lest we relinquish our sovereignty over our own selves.

He believes that it takes the whole team, including oneself if and only if (iff) oneself is a member of the product team, to make a great product. The secret is in knowing the makeup of one.

He lives in Virginia with his beloved wife, Sara Zemenu Senay. They have two grown children, Rebka and Amanuel. For leisure, when he's not walking furry member of the family Lexi he likes to read, travel, and hike. Golf is on his to-try list.

He is the founder of WholeTEAM Consulting Group, LLC.

15 July 2026