The Heller Report: Roundup of New CIOs for July

Fast-food restaurant giant McDonald’s USA appointed Valerie Ashbaugh, who led a transformation of the company’s consumer and restaurant platforms, as CIO and senior vice president; BrandSafway, a services provider to industrial and infrastructure markets, named JP Saini, former chief digital and technology officer at Sunbelt Rentals, as senior vice president and chief digital and information officer; Vertiv, a provider of power, cooling and IT infrastructure to data centers and other facilities, tapped Mike Giresi, former chief digital officer at Molex, as global CIO; and tax preparation company Liberty Tax selected Kassie Rangel, most recently vice president of enterprise solutions at Servpro Industries, as CIO.

Today’s major supply chain challenge facing companies is not new: “to be better prepared to manage operations in moments of near-total uncertainty,” Martha Heller writes in SupplyChainBrain. “The companies best positioned to navigate today’s tariff turbulence — and tomorrow’s unknowns — are those that treated past crises as catalysts for transformation.” Atop the list of to-dos: Making superior use of data and AI.

Interviewed in The Wall Street Journal about rising pay for IT leaders at U.S.-based companies, Martha Heller told the newspaper that CIO salaries are growing up to 30 percent because the board and executive suite recognize they need help making strategic use of artificial intelligence. “They finally, with a push in AI, understand that this CIO role is important,” Heller said. The newspaper reported CTO salaries are up by a similar percentage.

Electric car batteries have finite lives. Now a Nevada-based company has collected them to provide 12 megawatts of power in a microgrid that serves a data center that supports AI systems. Redwood Materials, a battery manufacturer and recycler, unveiled the microgrid on June 25, The Verge reported. “Redwood calls it the largest second-life battery deployment in the world with enough energy to power 9,000 homes, support 20 Amtrak trips between New York and Washington, D.C., or charge an EV for a 240,000-mile journey—the distance to the moon,” the article noted.