Patricia Seybold

Apple continues to transform education, now taking aim at the broken educational textbook industry. The creation, publishing, approval process, and distribution of educational textbooks for elementary, secondary, and university education have been ripe for a customer revolution for over 20 years. On-demand printing and the Internet both helped to accelerate the process. Visionary undertakings like Nature Education’s Scitable offering (high quality free life sciences’ learning materials) have also helped to pave the way. But it took Steve Jobs’ vision of transforming educational publishing to make this a reality.

What Apple has done is 1) to make it easy for students and teachers to access high-quality interactive learning materials for free from Apple U (via iTunes), 2) to provide tools (ibooks author) that will make it easy for more people to create and to publish high-quality, interactive educational content and 3) to provide a win/...

At the end of October, a few of our stalwart band (going strong since 1989) of Patty’s Pioneers met face-to-face to compare notes on where technology is going and what challenges they’re confronting and overcoming in their varied businesses. As usual, the conversations were rich and deep and built upon the foundation we’ve established over the years. We delight in seeing the recurring patterns in how we think about applying IT, how we view the world, and how we address organizational issues.

We are all tickled by the fact that today’s technologies lend themselves really well to the kinds of system designs the pioneers are really good at. The systems and software these leading-edge architects design have lots in common:

I love the new Amazon Fire. I’ve already pre-ordered mine. What appeals to me about the prospect of using the new Fire is the fact that I’ll be able to read in color as well as black and white. I’ll be able to enjoy a huge number of e-books at my fingertips directly from Amazon, and enjoy movies and TV shows as well. I’ll be able to read in bed without turning on the light. And, it’s lightweight and small enough that I can balance it in one hand and it won’t add much weight to my travelling gear. I also feel a loyalty to Amazon and a desire to buy directly from Amazon because they make my life convenient and easy.

I also own an iPad and I...

Here, we are continuing our series of articles on the roles and responsibilities that are needed to transform companies into flexible organizations that focus outwardly on the customer. Our focus this week: the VP of Customer Information and the distributed, cross-functional team of customer information specialists that you should have embedded in your various departments: Sales, Marketing, R&D, etc.

More than just the person in charge of customer intelligence, this high-ranking executive, who should report directly to the SVP of Customer Experience, needs to be responsible for the stewardship of the information that matters most to your customers, as well as the information about your customers.

Despite the amount of information that many customers are willing to share, most organizations still have a long way to go in pulling together actionable information that can be used to enhance their...