Dr. Irma M. Wyman

An early computer engineer and the first woman to become Vice President of Honeywell, Inc., she was a Systems Thinking tutor (the process of understanding how things influence one another within a whole); and was the first female CIO of Honeywell. In 1945, she received a Regents Scholarship and was accepted into the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan as one of seven female students. To supplement her scholarship, she worked as a switchboard operator and waitress. At the time, women in engineering programs received little encouragement and support. While her grades qualified her for membership in Tau Beta Phi, the engineering honor society, she received only an honorary membership, since the society did not admit women at the time. She graduated with a Bachelor of Sciences/EM degree in 1949. While still a junior in college, she worked on a missile guidance project at the Willow Run Research Center. To calculate trajectory, they used mechanical calculators. She visited a Navy research facility that was working on similar problems, and discovered they were using a prototype of a programmable computer that had been developed at Harvard University. She became interested in computers and later recalled that "I became an enthusiastic pioneer in this new technology and it led to my life's career." After graduation, she joined a start-up company that was eventually acquired by Honeywell Information Systems. She moved to Minneapolis and began a long management career at Honeywell, eventually serving as Chief Information Officer. She became vice president of Honeywell Corporate Information Management (CIM) before retiring in 1990. She then began a second career as archdeacon in the Minnesota Diocese of the Episcopal Church where she coached servant leadership, retiring again after ten years as Archdeacon of the Diocese of Minnesota. She supported research and planning as a thought leader in futures studies. As an aside to this, she contended to an interviewer in 1979, that ?It?s just as important to know when to ignore all the careful planning and seize an opportunity.? She endowed the Irma M. Wyman Scholarship at the University of Michigan's Center for the Education of Women to support women in engineering, computer science and related fields. She was awarded the Michigan Engineering Alumni Society Medal in 2001; and an Honorary Doctor of Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2007