Former HP CIO Gilles Bouchard Appointed COO of Opnext

Gilles Bouchard starts a new job as COO of Opnext today. He joined the Eatontown, N.J.-based manufacturer of laser technologies from Hewlett Packard (HP). Bouchard most recently served as HP’s executive vice president of global operations. During his 17 year tenure with the hardware manufacturer, he also held the CIO role and the title of EVP of operations. Prior to HP, he worked for IBM. Bouchard has a Master of Science degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from Ecole Centrale in Lyon, France.

Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group hired Rick Morris as its EVP and chief information officer. Morris most recently served as CIO of one of Capital One Financial‘s divisions. Prior to Capital One, from 1995 to 2002, he worked for UMB Bank. The 20-year veteran of the IT profession began his career at Payless Cashways as a programmer. Morris earned his Bachelor of Science degree in computer information systems from the University of Missouri in Kansas City. He returned to the University of Missouri in the mid-1990s to complete his MBA.

UC Davis Health System recruited Michael Minear to serve as CIO. Minear begins this new job on November 5. UC Davis Vice Chancellor Claire Pomeroy said in the press release announcing Minear’s hire that he was selected for his team-based management style and experience transforming large organizations and getting them to implement state of the art IT. The new CIO will oversee an annual operating budget of approximately $50 million, a capital budget over $10 million, and 500 employees. He is currently an associate faculty member teaching health management information systems at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg Graduate School of Public Health. He has held this position since 2001. From 2001 to 2006, he worked for the University of Maryland Medical Center as its CIO. There, he led 180 technology professionals and oversaw an annual capital IT budget in the range of $15 million to $31 million. For more information on Minear’s background and accomplishments, check out the press release.

Powerway appointed Alan Ackroyd CIO. Ackroyd comes to the Indianapolis, Indiana-based manufacturer of product development process solutions from Cohesia Corp., where he was executive director of technology. Powerway acquired Cohesia in June, and Ackroyd has been managing the IT integration of the two organizations. In his new role, Ackroyd will direct strategic planning and oversee support for Powerway’s software as a service operations.

PSS World Medical promoted an internal candidate to fill its vacant CIO position. After a four month search, the medical products distributor concluded that its own senior director of IT infrastructure, Carl Duhnoski, who had been serving as the company’s interim CIO for the past three months, was the best candidate for the job. Duhnoski, 38, has worked for PSS World Medical for two years. He has managed the company’s data archiving initiative, which was designed to improve the performance of systems, implemented best practices for streamlining the IT infrastructure, and led the relocation of the company’s data center to a new hosted facility. Prior to PSS World Medical, Duhnoski spent 12 years with Bloomberg, where he rose to the position of global program director serving the North American, European and Asian markets. During his tenure with Bloomberg, he oversaw the development of electronic trading applications and created a software quality assurance group.

Duhnoski bucked the odds that are

stacked against interim CIOs when it comes to being named official CIO. I wrote about the difficulty interim CIOs face in getting the offical CIO role–the challenges that they face in being selected and the signs that indicate whether or not they have a good shot at the job. Career Strategist Martha Heller also wrote about the “Interim CIO Jinx.”