Linda Zecher

While Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's recent acquisitions have taken the Boston company outside of the realm of traditional publishing and into businesses like computer games and data analytics, HMH usually doesn't stray far from the classroom.

This strategy of acquiring education-related technologies played out again this week as HMH completed its purchase of Channel One News, a New York-based provider of news shows aimed at kids and packaged to be aired in schools. Much of the video content is often accompanied with educational resources such as transcripts, quizzes and writing exercises.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has started working on a new chapter in its long and storied history: The Boston publisher filed plans to sell stock to the public. HMH emerged nearly debt free from a bankruptcy about a year ago, and its revenue has been growing again this year. But the company, like all traditional media publishers, will face challenges as it tries to shift from a focus on the printed word to a world where content is increasingly delivered digitally to computers, tablets and phones. 

Brook Colangelo has already made his digital mark. As the former CIO of the Executive Office of the President (EOP) for the Obama administration, he pursued open source website-development projects for the WhiteHouse.gov site, ushered in mobile devices while ushering out desktop computers with floppy discs, and embarked on such crowdsourcing experiments as We the People. Colangelo, 35, also shook up the culture in another way: He leveraged the benefits of an Agile methodology to make sure these innovations happened fast. That adds up to some serious CIO street cred…