Selectron Celebrates Mike Hannegan’s 40th Work Anniversary

Mike Hannegan, Vice President of Technical Services, marks his 40th year with Selectron Technologies this month. Since 1978, Mike has worked to put ever-evolving technology to use in solving problems for customers. 

Early in his career at Selectron, working in telephony was on site and physical. Crawling through ceilings at Reser’s Fine Foods to install and maintain phone lines, while being careful not to fall into staff offices, is a vivid memory of Mike’s. Even then, telephony continued to develop and innovate. Huge pieces of equipment, once the size of conference room walls, shrunk down to no bigger than a filing cabinet. Private branch exchanges – telephone networks used within a company – previously run by mechanical timers, became electronic.  

In the 1980s, the need for telephony innovation became obvious as the demand for telecommunications in business grew. Ray Stevens, the founder of Selectron, saw that most businesses were using voicemail, and he wanted to do more. Envisioning a way for people to access automated information, he worked with Mike to create a solution where Renaissance Bank Card Service customers could activate their pre-paid credit cards, while also getting account balances and payment information. This was the very beginning of Selectron’s long career in providing interactive voice response – IVR – solutions.

Mike is an integral part of our focus on the government sector. In the early 1990s, in the course of completing the permitting process while building his house, he recognized the potential of IVR to serve government permitting functions. Working with Washington County, Oregon, he brought Selectron’s first permitting IVR solution live. Since then, Selectron has deployed over 500 solutions to a variety of government agencies, and Mike has been a vital part of their development and deployment.

Over the years, what has kept Mike excited and engaged in his work are the people he gets to collaborate with, both at Selectron and at customer organizations. He attributes the open culture of ideas at Selectron and the partnership approach of our customers to his continued ability to problem solve and innovate. Every day he is grateful to our customers for making work fun, and he looks forward to many more years of helping solve problems through the latest technology.