When Dr. Lynne Baldwin was a young girl, her mother and father encouraged her to aim high. “Neither of my parents went to college, but it was a foregone conclusion that I would go to college. If there was something I wanted to do, they always encouraged me to go ahead and try it,” she recalls.
Baldwin liked math, so she took advanced math classes in high school and earned a mathematics degree at the University of Texas at Austin. She switched from math to computers when her future brother-in-law took a class in computer science and suggested that Lynne and her fiancé, Dr. Jack Baldwin, take the class. A few years later Lynne and Jack were teaching computer science at UT-Texas and then the University of Nebraska at Omaha. In 1979 they left academia to join the business world.
“Two people can only generate a limited amount of work, so we contacted a couple of other people to join us as business partners,” Baldwin explains. At UNO, she had been a faculty advisor for Mike Meeks, who became a co-founder of BHMI and is still with the company today.
BHMI moved from the Baldwins’ home to an office building in Miracle Hills in 1987 and relocated a few years later to 108th and Dodge. The company has been at its current location for about 15 years.
Today, BHMI continues to do some custom work but is best known for its flagship enterprise software system, Concourse Financial Software Suite. BHMI began developing the system in the early 2000s to fulfill a financial company’s request for a stand-alone back office system to replace their IBM mainframe computer. Rather than creating a batch system, Dr. Baldwin spearheaded the development of a system that would process transactions in real time. “In the payments industry, everybody talks about real-time payments or near-real-time payments,” she comments. “We had that idea back in the early 2000s, so we were ahead of the curve.”
BHMI is ahead of the curve in other ways as well. “Programmers need to think more than talk, so everybody in our company has an office with a door,” Dr. Baldwin says. “We think it helps productivity and concentration. Every office also has a write-on wall so people can have meetings in their offices without disturbing anyone else.”
In a competitive industry, BHMI attracts new talent through a paid internship program for college students. About 25 percent of BHMI interns become employees after graduation.
11602 West Center Road, Suite 250
Omaha, NE 68144
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