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Beyond the Bio…Originally from South Bend, IN, home of the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame, Greg was transplanted to Arkansas in the mid-70s via a 4-year stint in the USAF. While in service, Greg earned his BS from Southern Illinois University. Enchanted by Arkansas’ natural beauty and mild winter climate, allowing year-round pursuit of outdoor passions, he became a proud resident. Greg earned his MS degree from the University of Arkansas in 1983 and transferred allegiance from the Fighting Irish to the Hogs. An early life desire to learn to sail blossomed on Little Rock’s Lake Maumelle. Thirty-one years and 3 sailboats later, Greg remains a nearly every weekend cruising sailor on beautiful Lake Ouachita. His vacations center around sailing in the Caribbean and Pacific Northwest. Greg is blessed with his immediate family close-by in central Arkansas – sailing first-mate/wife Sharon (although sometimes she is the captain), 3 children, 4 grandchildren and Cooper, a charismatic Yorkie named for a favorite island in the British Virgin Islands. Sail on!
Greg took a circuitous route to discover his long-term passion for Information Technology. While employed in the early 80s as an Industrial Engineer at the now defunct Little Rock Timex Corporation, Greg wrote programs in Fortran on an IBM 360 to solve tactical manufacturing production challenges. Realizing an internal fire for programming, he found an entry-level programming opportunity at Arkansas Systems, Inc. (ASI) in Little Rock. Greg joined ASI in 1983 just after they deployed their first ATM interface to the IBM midrange System 34 using 3270 bisynchronous communications. It would seem by now all those EBCDIC control characters would be purged from memory in favor of more important things, but no. Through the years with ASI, later ARKSYS, Greg performed or lead many domestic and international software installations and developed several significant modules in the Integrated Transaction Management (ITM) financial transaction processing system. At ARKSYS, he served in a variety of roles including management of the Online Banking Environment and the Online Switch group. Following Euronet’s acquisition of ARKSYS, Greg served as Director of Quality Assurance, Director of Development and as a Sr. Professional Services Consultant. Greg took an impactful assignment while at ARKSYS, to become educated in and then teach Project Management (PM) to the company. Greg continues to employ this PM knowledge and methodology at the Friday Firm where projects proceed non-stop.
Greg McKee is the Chief Information Officer at Arkansas’ largest law firm, Friday Eldredge and Clark, popularly known as the “Friday Firm.” Greg was recruited to the firm as its CIO in 2003 by fellow Arkansas Academy of Computing (AAOC) member Karen Halbert, former technologist turned attorney. During his tenure at the firm, he has built and worked to retain for 15 years, a core team of MS-degreed computer scientists.