A nine-year CIO explains how credit unions accumulate operational debt by launching products and processes with "just make it work" as the plan. The manual handoffs, duplicate data entry, and uncoordinated workflows quietly compound until the organization can't scale or adopt automation.

Nicole Coughlin has served as CIO of the Town of Cary, NC for over a decade, more than twice the typical CIO tenure. She explains how the breadth of centralized municipal IT keeps the role from stagnating, why handing out AI tools is not the same as having an AI strategy, and what it actually takes to get executive buy-in in a government environment.