Jana Hennis’ Unexpected Path to IT

A kind voice greets all Arch employees who call for IT assistance.

“Thank you for calling the Arch IT Service Desk. Your call is important to us…”

It’s the voice of Jana Hennis, Team Lead, End User Support, who is based in Greensboro, North Carolina and is responsible for assisting employees with onboarding, offboarding and troubleshooting IT issues. It’s a front-facing role that puts her in contact with people at all levels of the company.

But it’s not what she anticipated when she joined Arch.

Hennis began her Arch career in 2015, where she filled in at the front desk while also helping as an administrative assistant. Over time, she also started assisting a Mortgage group system engineer who worked in a nearby office whenever he needed help.

“He asked me to work with one of his directs to learn how to upload everyone’s picture to Outlook,” she said. “That was the first time I’d ever used a script, and I really enjoyed that.”

By 2017, Hennis was the full-time receptionist, but she still helped with tasks around the office. She was folding t-shirts at her desk when she met Scott Kelly, Senior Vice President, Global IT Infrastructure, who was visiting from California.

“He asked me ‘So what is it that you do?’” she said.

Hennis explained her normal receptionist duties of greeting visitors and answering the phone but added that she always asked people if they needed help.

“He said, ‘OK,’” she recalled. “And he told me he remembered that.”

Hennis began picking up more IT side work, answering calls, logging help desk tickets and giving permissions to employees who needed access to various platforms.

Over time, her performance in opening and closing IT tickets consistently ranked at the top in weekly reports, catching the eye of IT executives.

When a role opened on the Arch MI End User Support team in early 2018, Hennis was offered the job. Her main duties were onboarding and offboarding employees, a process that she helped to fine tune.   

She’s continued to grow in her career, including her recent promotion to Team Lead in Global End User Services.

Along the way, she became the “Voice of IT.” At one point, the company established one central phone number for the IT help desk. But the team did not want to use the usual AI-generated voice to greet callers.

Enter Hennis.

“They said it was because I have a very sweet voice and also because I know a lot of people, so it would be very personable,” she said.

When Hennis looks at her career so far, she says there are three things that have kept her at Arch: the people, the opportunities and the benefits, in that order.

“My goal is to work with the company until I retire.”