The Maker of WholeTEAM

EPHREM BARTOLOMEOS is an IT business analyst with more than twenty-five years of experience in enterprise software development and maintenance, including more than fifteen years and counting working as an IT business analyst. He is the maker of WholeTEAM. He helps organizations and teams make great products, products that meet business needs well.

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.

In July 1995 he met his future wife and his soulmate 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 his wife 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,) and in his opinion the most crucial (and the hardest) activity in ESDM, the most crucial (and the hardest) activity in DevOps—and became one. And he has remained one to this day.

At the same time, they raised their children.

And he made WholeTEAM.

Currently for his day job, he works for a major IT consulting and technology services company based in Northern Virginia, providing hands-on requirements support on an IT modernization and digital transformation client project. Beside his day job, in his free time, he 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.

He dedicates WholeTEAM to his beloved wife Sara and their dear children Rebka and Amanuel.

He lives in Virginia. For leisure, when he's not walking the lovely and the always vigilant furry member of the family Lexi, he likes to read, travel, and hike. Golf is on his to-try list. He can be reached at ephrembartolomeos@gmail.com. Contact him if he can help—he'll be happy to help.


See Also:

> A Call He Did Not Answer — A True Story


Ephrem Kebede Bartolomeos
29 May 2026
Sterling, Virginia, United States