Biography
Marquis Who’s Who honors Kay A. Wise for pioneering design of business processes using cutting-edge computer and networking technologies.
Kay A. Wise is principal of The Wise Choice Consulting Co., former MIS Director of Applied Communications Inc. (ACI), and former Director of Financial Systems for First Data Resources (FDR). She has been included in Marquis Who’s Who, selected for a distinguished career of more than four decades in computer systems design and business process improvement.
Kay’s career started in 1974, in the days of Arpanet and the UNIVAC 1100. On a Kellogg Foundation grant to Creighton University, she served as research associate to Steve Evans, who had been in the first artificial intelligence classes at Carnegie Mellon. Together they worked with faculty and with Henningson, Durham & Richardson to build an online, searchable health sciences curriculum using a semantic net.
Among her most significant achievements was the design and implementation of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system for ACI while the company grew from 100 to 700 employees. The design followed techniques in the U.S. Army manual Structured Systems Analysis and Design and C.J. Date’s An Introduction to Relational Database Design, and the implementation used Tandem’s pioneering client-server architecture. ACI employees used the system to catalog every piece of code needed to install an ATM or POS system, every problem reported and every fix released. Each employee entered time spent per product, per customer and per administrative task, and each unit of code was tracked through development as part of a priced contract item. By the time U.S. West sought to acquire ACI, the ERP reports detailed five years of profitability by product and by customer, proving ACI a worthy acquisition in 1986.
After leaving ACI, Kay founded The Wise Choice Consulting Co., where she designed and built a historical society library system and a sawmill log inventory system using Novell NetWare and Advanced Revelation, a DOS-based development environment built around variable-length fields stored in multi-valued structures. In the early 1990s she served on the board of the Douglas County Chapter of the Red Cross and the Omaha Chapter of the Data Processing Management Association (DPMA), managing Infotec ’91 and Infotec ’92, the region’s leading technical conference.
As systems became more complex and roles more specialized, Kay joined a large corporation to grow the management skills she had been learning from Gerald M. Weinberg and others at Consultant’s Camp each summer. In 1992 she joined FDR, where she oversaw a five-million-dollar, fourteen-month upgrade of their heavily customized Oracle ERP system before the year 2000. The project came in on time and under budget. Later she initiated and led a software engineering process group (SEPG) covering eighteen hundred engineers, following the Capability Maturity Model (CMM).
Kay retired from FDR in 2002 to pursue her interest in art, both painting and collecting. In 2006 she accompanied her husband to live in Dubai. There she studied art with Suheil Baddor, then photographed artifacts collected by Ahmed Al Mansoori. With Anneka Lessen she collaborated to write The Gulf Trade Museum while building a relational database inventory system for the Crossroads of Civilizations Museum.
Kay then joined the Dubai Public Policy Research Centre. The Dubai government had asked the Centre to answer the question, “What are the ten most important issues in Dubai based on media reporting and public comments?” Kay estimated the project, then designed, contracted and managed the solution. Using AI techniques along with relational database and data flow design experience, she implemented a system that let dozens of employees in multiple countries record radio, TV and print media opinions and track and rank the associated public policy issues, using Microsoft SharePoint with Datapolis workflow automation software.
Since returning to the United States in 2015, Kay has concentrated on website design and on the publication of Positive Politics, describing how to use politics effectively, with honor and integrity, to advance the common good.
Her accomplishments have been recognized with several honors, from being named among Outstanding Young Women in America in 1967 to Marquis Who’s Who. Reflecting on her career, Ms. Wise attributes her success to a habit of life-long learning, to curiosity about system requirements, and to finding fun in collaborative teamwork.