Despite long haul flights, lack of sleep, back-to-back meetings – and a recent competitive foot race – Brook Colangelo is firing on all cylinders.
The chief information officer of educational and trade publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) is in the company’s newish Dublin offices near Trinity College, standing in front of a glass wall with a view out over the rooftops.
Based in HMH’s Boston headquarters, he travels extensively to the company’s offices globally, including Dublin, where about 100 of the 240 HMH staff report to him (most of the remainder develop digital content and report to the company’s chief content officer). Almost all work on the learning management platform for HMH’s array of educational offerings – “the delivery system for the content and platform”.
His domain is "all the technology that enables our company to grow", both for the functioning of the company itself, and the development and delivery of content.
White House work
Straightforward enough. But it is the youthful Colangelo's previous job that casts his current role in an interesting light. Until December, he was the CIO for the White House, answering to the famously social media savvy president of the United States.
Colangelo was the man who handed over the first fully approved presidential Blackberry so those Obama tweets could continue in office.
Yet he has described that job as commencing with the worst 40 days ever, because the technology in the White House was astonishingly old.
People were still using floppy drives a decade after Apple had stopped putting them in its computers. There was only a single data centre. The email system failed regularly.
Nonetheless, “it was the most amazing time and the most amazing customers: the president, the first lady, [vice-president] Dr Biden, and of course the staff.”
He revamped the White House technology, brought in open source projects, stabilised the email system, and introduced mobile devices to staff, such as those Blackberries.
But however sexy the job of White House CIO might appear from the outside, Colangelo says, from day one, the realisation that it was first and foremost, a tough and challenging job – and often one focused on trouble-shooting – hit pretty quickly.
“The first time you answer a call from Air Force One, you think: ‘Oh, cool.’ Then you realise, he’s not calling to say hi.”
He describes his new job as “so much more exciting. You’re not playing catch-up and turnaround. You’re redeveloping and leading. Here, we have a gateway market, all hungry for transformation.”
He says the intensity of the new job is different – “my weekend email has gone down” – but that some aspects of being CIO remain the same.
“Your assessment of the fundamental tools you need to enable your business is the same. There’s a skill set in design that’s also common across all areas. The toolset may be different but, fundamentally, this whole job is about understanding your customer.
“It’s why I fundamentally believe you don’t have to come from the education or technology industry to do this job.”
His parents ran a restaurant in Connecticut when he was a boy. “So I learned early on the importance of listening and responding to customer needs. It’s exactly the same in the CIO role.”
He grins and adds: “But I think it’s fairly safe to say things have been a lot more stable” than those first 40 days in the White House. “The risk/reward is different but that’s great – I don’t want that risk environment, I want a solid, stable environment.”
That constant battle to bring technology in the White House into the 21st century was clearly tiring, and contributed to his decision to leave such a high profile job. But why move to a job in educational technology?
“I’m attracted to a mission, simply put. The education market is in such a transition. There’s an opportunity to transform how education is delivered. It’s just so exciting.”
Touch technology has totally altered the area, he notes. An older generation grew up on computers; his own generation, he said, was primarily on laptops.
"But we have a whole new generation where touch is the way they interact and learn. That's a whole new challenge" for an education company. He sees it as "an opportunity to make education more interactive, engaging and adaptive".
Turbulent times
He also stepped into a company that has itself gone through turbulent times and a major reorganisation in recent years, when HMH – part of the Anglo-Irish Bank-funded Education Media and Publishing Group (EMPG) – filed for bankruptcy and restructured a heavy debt load. The Irish former CEO, and chair of EMPG, Barry O'Callaghan, left.
O'Callaghan had been chief executive of Riverdeep, the Irish educational publisher that grew quickly during the boom years and acquired US publisher Houghton Mifflin in 2006.
New chief executive Linda K Zecker, who came in when many of the Irish senior management were replaced, called Colangelo in on his first day at work and told him “I have one thing I want you to do – break some eggs. Throw the whole carton at the wall.”
Colangelo says that gave him freedom to experiment within the division.
“I could try something, fail, fail fast”, and search for new technology approaches that work. “It’s exciting.”
Linda K Zecher, a former Microsoft vice-president who joined HMH in 2011, recruited him. "I was thinking of moving on, but I didn't really have a target market. But I've always, always been a mission-driven leader."
He comes from a political communications background himself. He worked as an intern for California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, now the House of Representatives minority leader, and also worked on Al Gore’s presidential campaign.
“I was supposed to be a media booker, but I just could not stand being on the phone all day. I said ‘we need a database’,” and that started his learning experience in bringing technology into political campaigns and fast-moving emergency services.
He became CIO of the Democratic Convention Committee, and was also IT project manager for the American Red Cross Hurricane Recovery Program.
He feels the fact that he didn’t come into the CIO role from the education industry means “I have no agenda, no technology pick, no thought process on how we should build [platforms and systems]”.
Common to all CIOs, he says, his first task was “to assess the situation and see what’s on fire, what’s smoking and what’s flammable”. Then, he says, you bring in the IT to address each issue.
His focus is on several areas – “looking at the platform technology and building for the future, looking at our content management and building toward the future, and retaining skills and recruiting talent to build towards the future”. And all of that within the wider picture of making better educational tools that engage children.
“There’s so much where we can take [children] and lead them to better outcomes. Education is such a challenge in so many countries now. Technology can help. It’s not going to solve all the problems, but it can enable so much.”
