Anita Gjesbakk (Norway) has a Master degree in Engineering Cybernetics from Norwegian University of Science, 1990, which she completed after completing a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering from the College of Trondheim.

The first eight years after graduation, she worked with PLC programming and other development tasks, consulting services in the Oracle database and Novell network systems area, in addition to marketing/sales.

In 1998 she was employed by the National Collection Agency (NCA) in Mo i Rana, Norway, as database administrator (dba) for the internal financial system and also for the financial management systems the Norwegian police, which is operated and supported by the NCA. Three years later Anita was appointed the head of division for operation and development, and was engaged in developing this unit until 2006, when she went into position as head of the project office.

In the period 2010-2011 she was appointed Deputy Director General for the Creditor Department, the business unit for the voluntary collection, until the NAC reorganized the organization to a process organization (3 main processes/departments instead of 6). During this transition she focused primarily on implementing a Business Process Management system for the organization, and in the fall of 2012 she took over the position as CIO, and is leading the IT department.

The IT organization consists of about 80 people in five divisions, in addition to a staff:

Technical division: operates the infrastructure, databases, security etc.
Development division: system development.
Functional System Management division: administers the applications functionally (change management, test, release etc.).
PLØS division: operates and supports the accounting system for the police, including electronic invoicing.
SIAN support division: support unit for the collection systems for the bailiff, in addition to also being the contact point for support internally.
Staff: lawyer, security officer, reporting and administration of plans etc.

The NAC has a sourcing strategy that we run all systems in-house, so the department is responsible for securing that all systems and infrastructure is up and running at all times. The department also aim to be a “partner-plus” with the business. This implies being actively involved with the business and forward leaning in offering services and presenting solutions that are adding value to the business, funded on the good knowledge we have about the business processes. The IT functions aim to meet the business early in the development processes, and are able to impact the way the business develops, to ensure efficiency through digitization, based on good IT-solutions.