A Wide Enough Scope

Most CIOs leave when the role stops expanding. Nicole Coughlin has been CIO of the Town of Cary, NC for over a decade, and the role has not stopped expanding. That is not a coincidence.

Cary's IT organization is centralized, which means it touches everything. Public safety CAD systems. ERP and finance. Public works and truck routing. Traffic prediction. Permit workflows. As the town grows and technology accelerates, the surface area of the role expands with it. "We get our hands on a lot of different types of verticals," she said. "We're able to help all the different organizations."

For Coughlin, that breadth is not incidental to her engagement. It is the source of it. What keeps her in the same seat is not comfort. It is the steady arrival of new problems that require the same organization to keep building new capabilities.

The AI Test

Coughlin spent eight years at Fidelity Investments in Boston before deliberately pivoting to government in 2007. She has since thought carefully about what it means to drive innovation in an environment where procurement cycles are long, budgets are constrained, and risk tolerance is structurally low.

The current test of that thinking is AI. Cary's town council has directed the organization to move forward on data and AI, but the directive did not come with a blueprint. Most organizations in that position hand out licenses and call it transformation. Coughlin saw that as a different kind of failure. Access to tools is not strategy. She chose not to take the shortcut.

Instead, she built a three-part framework: off-the-shelf generative tools for knowledge workers who write reports and summarize meetings; workflow automation for identifying process bottlenecks; and an internal AI infrastructure she calls a "cognitive city" model, where applications learn from each other as the town's population and needs evolve. "The goal is that that model allows for something for everyone," she said. "They can choose something, nothing, or all of them."

Getting Buy-In Without the Jargon

One of the harder lessons she brought from private sector was that the same argument lands differently in government. Early in her tenure at Cary, she needed to make the case for wireless in the town's offices. Her executive did not understand why it mattered.

She did not explain it with a technology brief. She asked him how he worked at home. Did he sit at his desk? On the couch? At the kitchen island? He said the kitchen island sometimes. She asked how long his ethernet cord was.

"He goes, 'I'm on my home wireless,'" she said. "And I'm like, exactly."

The point landed. Coughlin has used variations of that approach throughout her career.

In government, the technology case rarely gets an initiative approved. The human case does.

Building Toward What Comes Next

Coughlin is an introvert by her own description. She made a deliberate choice early in her government career to build a network anyway, forcing herself to attend events and making a point to bring direct reports with her when she could. Her reasoning was straightforward: the people around her needed exposure to the broader CIO community, and she was not going to be in her role forever.

A number of people she invested in have since moved into CIO and CSO roles of their own. She describes the satisfaction plainly: "Look at me, I'm a proud little mama."

The same instinct applies to how she thinks about her team's development inside Cary. She has sent groups through startup accelerator programs, not to build companies, but to change how her team thinks about their work. The goal was for them to stop seeing themselves as implementers and start seeing themselves as problem-solvers. "I wanted them to be the advisors," she said, "and say, we can help you solve this problem this way."

The Honest Prediction

When asked about AI and the future of work, Coughlin did not offer a comfortable answer. She does not expect the technology to reduce workloads. She expects it to expand capacity, which historically means organizations take on more work, not less.

Her reference point is the typewriter to PC transition. That did not slow anyone down. Neither, in her view, will this. For a CIO who has built a career by running toward the next wave of complexity rather than away from it, the prediction carries the weight of experience.

"We're never going to outrun capacity," she said. "It just gets faster and faster, and there'll just be more of it."