The Heller Report: Roundup of New CIOs for April

Among the highlights: Defense contractor Raytheon, a unit of RTX Corporation, named Jennifer Flynn, previously the vice president and CIO of government programs at RTX, as its new CIO; beauty care giant Revlon appointed Ralph Marshall, previously Starbucks vice president of technology for Europe, Middle East and Africa, to be its new chief information and digital officer; and retailer Books-A-Million promoted Brandon Waters, its senior vice president of IT to be CIO.

When he went to advise a global enterprise about modernizing their systems, Niel Nickolaisen could not have guessed he would have a front-row seat to a ransomware attack against his client. In this article, Nickolaisen, an IT consultant and director of enterprise integrations at Utah State University, recounts the response and lessons learned from this experience. Among them: fast action after detection is vital, as is backup data.

What if you are an expectant mother – say past the 38-week mark – and you wonder, when will the baby come? If you are Maggie Appleton, a design engineer, you use data to make a tool to view the probabilities. “Due dates now seem a bit absurd to me after learning how much uncertainty there is in determining them,” Appleton writes, noting the approximations in pregnancy estimates and the varieties of women’s experience. Her tool uses a 2001 UK study that recorded data about 1,514 women who gave birth during a 10-year period.

Heller was recently retained by Crayola to recruit a Director, Business Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence. Crayola LLC, a Hallmark company headquartered in Easton, Penn., is the leading consumer products brand in the children's creative expression category. Crayola sells its products in more than 80 countries and in 12 different languages. For this role, we identified Haja Adaiyar, who most recently served as Director, Data Analytics at Capgemini. Adaiyar holds an MBA from Stevens Institute of Technology. Congratulations, Haja!