JNR Networks was founded in 2005 by a husband and wife duo, James and Natalie Riley (Yes, that’s where the JNR comes from). Our mission has always been to deliver IT services that are perfectly aligned with our clients’ business purposes and needs. To understand our journey, let’s take a step back to the past.

In high school, in the early 90s, back in the days of dial-up connections to AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy, James began doing IT work by helping residential customers. While the technical work was fulfilling, it was the opportunity to serve people that truly captivated him.

As time went on, James continued to do IT work for residential customers and progressively expanded his services to include some businesses. After high school, he pursued studies to become a pastor and served as a youth pastor, where he continued learning about serving people, communicating, and working with people through their various needs.

Midway through his college career, Natalie fell ill, prompting James to leave college and relocate the family. He then took on various IT roles, from managing a retail computer store to IT consulting, running a call center help desk, and eventually handling larger network engineering projects. Throughout this period, he continued consulting on the side.

In the early 2000s, James and Natalie welcomed their 2 daughters, and their family moved to Tucson to work for Natalie’s parents’ machining business. James managed the front office, handled quoting, shipping, and receiving, and optimized operational processes. He implemented IT systems that supported and enhanced these critical business processes, deepening his understanding of how IT should serve business and human needs.

In 2005, James and Natalie started JNR Networks. James began working in the business full-time, while Natalie assisted with administrative functions and homeschooled their two daughters. In 2011, James and Natalie adopted two more daughters into their family.

In 2005, James and Natalie started JNR Networks. James began working in the business full-time, while Natalie assisted with administrative functions and homeschooled their two daughters. In 2011, James and Natalie adopted two more daughters into their family.

By 2010, JNR Networks hired its first team member and has steadily grown since. As we hire, we seek team members who are not only competent in IT but also have a heart to serve people. This means we don’t hire the typical “nerd” but focus on building a team deeply connected with the service we offer to our clients, their businesses, their teams, and their clients.

From the beginning, JNR Networks was built from a heart and passion to serve people. We think of ourselves as a Business Consulting Firm that specializes in IT. While we handle typical IT tasks (such as procurement, design, implementation, help desk, lifecycle planning, etc.), we bring a rare business acumen to the IT industry. This competency allows us to engage our clients at a deeper level, focusing on their business needs, culture, and beyond, independent of IT. Our solutions often involve IT but are rarely exclusively IT solutions. More often than not, our implementations also touch on HR policy, business culture, strategic initiatives, operational processes, and more.

Through the years, we have realized that an amazing IT firm needs to focus on three major things:

1. Business Alignment: IT systems have no intrinsic value; they are subordinate to the business and people they serve. Therefore, all IT systems need to be built in a way that, first and foremost, aligns with the needs of the business and the people who use them.

2. Solid IT Engineering: While this may seem obvious, an IT firm needs to be very competent in designing and implementing the IT systems they work with. What may not seem so obvious is that this requires constantly combating complexity and designing systems to be as simple yet capable as possible. While IT systems will always have complexity, one mark of very competent engineering is the level to which we can simplify the design. This simplicity makes systems much more usable, stable, supportable, and secure.

3. Ongoing Maintenance and Support: No matter how well a system is designed, it is unrealistic to expect it to operate perfectly and optimally indefinitely.

• IT systems need maintenance, including applying patches, cleaning up unnecessary files, and more. We started doing this back in the 90s and called it “Ongoing Maintenance.” Now, marketing has coined it “Managed Services.”
• Even more critical than the technical maintenance of IT systems is maintaining business alignment. We do this through quarterly meetings with business leadership to ensure that we remain tuned in to the business needs and can continuously make the necessary course corrections to maintain that alignment.