The Heller Report: How Boards Can Identify a CISO to Drive Business Enabled Innovation

Boards seeking chief information security officers have a critical task to find the right person who can do more than the traditional role of mitigating security risks, explains Jason Henninger, managing director at Heller. In this interview, Henninger explains how the CISO role has expanded, how companies should view this change, and the experiences boards are seeking in their next CISO.

The role of software quality assurance has expanded exponentially with the rise of cloud-native architectures, real-time data pipelines, AI-powered features – and the need in certain industries to follow government regulations, writes Harini Shankar, director of technology at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. In this article, she explains how technology leaders can ensure their enterprises follow two mandates when developing new software: observability and compliance.

At The Pudding, visual journalists embarked on a data science project to determine which wines with an animal on the label are a good value. They used wine rating data from the Vivino app and Chat-GPT Vision to scan labels to identify which bottles sported cats, dogs, fish, and birds. They found 17.47 percent of 1,409 “animal wines” from 18 countries were both reasonably priced and highly rated. While the creators make this fun to view, the methodology they share makes the work accessible. For example, people had to review the AI system’s output to ensure accuracy. And some data didn’t fit; only one label had a kangaroo (Australia’s Yellow Tail), so it wasn’t included. 

Heller was recently retained by Black & Veatch to recruit a Senior Vice President, Cloud Engineering and Resilience. Black & Veatch is a 100-percent employee-owned global engineering, procurement, consulting and construction company with a more than 100-year track record of innovation in sustainable infrastructure. For this role, we identified David Gingerich, who most recently served as Senior Vice President, IT Infrastructure, Engineering and Operations for Advance Auto Parts. Gingerich holds a B.S from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from North Central College. Congratulations, David!