Lori MacMullen, CIO, Supply & Services with the Government of New Brunswick, brings the sophisticated end user’s perspective to provincial IT projects. A 22-year public sector veteran, she graduated from university with a business degree and “somehow ended up on an IT project as a user analyst,” MacMullen said. “The application of technology to business needs piqued my interest.”
These days MacMullen applies technology to the public’s needs. As CIO she’s involved in most of New Brunswick’s e-government projects, including the development of a provincial Web strategy and an information management platform.
She said she’s proud of many IT undertakings, among them the province’s fundamental ESD program, designed in the mid-1990s with an eye to making New Brunswick a digital mecca in Canada, and “the implementation of one e-mail system for all government – not multiple instances of the same software, but ‘one’ system.”
MacMullen says service is the name of the game. “Transactional services, health service, education, social service . . . are the driving force behind e-government.
“Our next frontier will be exploiting information and technology to fundamentally change the way we work – moving from a vertically based and organizationally driven approach to a horizontally based, single-image government approach enabled and supported by information and technology.”
There are challenges, however, particularly “the need to work horizontally in a vertical world while at the same time ensuring transparency and accountability,” she said.
MacMullen pointed out that as CIO, she is the catalyst for change in New Brunswick’s civil service; it’s a task she is prepared to tackle.
“The role of the CIO will hopefully be seen as an enabler of change through the exploitation of the rapid changes and possibilities available to us through . . . information communications technology.”