INTERVIEW A quest for discomfort
Kristi Marchbanks has been appointed senior vice president for global sales, marketing and customer experience at ProQuest after more than 15 years leading marketing, sales and customer experience at organisations including GrowLife E-Commerce, Corbis and
Amazon.com
What are your early impressions of the scholarly publishing business?
The industry continues to undergo exciting and important changes. The abundance of top-quality content combined with improvements in discovery tools, enable the library to ‘meet the user where they are’ and assist them on their research journey. Movement from print to electronic has been an important enabler, making more content available to the user on any device, anytime, anywhere. Companies like ProQuest need to support modern institutions with solutions and systems that serve their total constituent base while surfacing all content formats with flexible research and discovery tools.
How will your previous experience translate to the world of research? I have been fortunate to work in companies where ideas combined with forward thinking customers has enabled collaboration; where working together has resulted in new solutions that solve big problems. During my time at SeaTab Software – building the industry’s first big data, cloud computing service – we enabled companies like Sony and T-Mobile to data-mine their global customer data for the first time, helping them understand defects
‘We have to be comfortable being uncomfortable’
and improve service levels to customers. At
Amazon.com, I led the development of the first business-to-business solution, enabling institutions to use purchase orders and specify deliveries during specific time blocks. Schools were able to plan efficiently, arranging for their warehouses to be open to receive the goods at the appropriate time. I am excited about
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these same possibilities at ProQuest; building impactful, solutions that solve big problems for libraries and users. ProQuest customers are already sharing their most pressing concerns and working with us as a trusted partner to build solutions.
Can you tell us a little about your ambitions for ProQuest? Industry transformation is in the business news nearly every day. In many cases, improvements enable a customer to solve long-standing, really difficult problems for the first time. I have been in several industries undergoing dramatic change. It is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. ProQuest, and this exciting industry we are part of, are on the precipice of the insights provided by big data, the stresses of serving five generations of learners with different learning styles and technology skills, and the great benefits that come from exponentially growing content to be curated and discovered. Industry changes create great opportunities for companies that ‘see the possibilities’ afforded by change and are nimble enough to position themselves for the future state. ProQuest has a great history of being early in the market: providing discovery services (ProQuest Summon), and early and robust ebook offerings (ProQuest EBL and ebrary and more recently with the addition of ProQuest Coutts).
The ProQuest melting pot of innovative companies has created an organisation with complementary strengths and many stories. My goal is to ensure we tell a unified story, positioning ProQuest and the role we play in the world of research. It’s an essential step for ProQuest to ensure that our customers understand the breadth of services and solutions we provide, how they fit together and how they can be mixed to enable them to achieve their goals.
What challenges do you predict for information companies such as ProQuest in coming years? Companies that thrive in a dynamic market are agile and adaptable. The pace of technological change is relentless and we must remain widely informed and open to new ideas. With more than 60 per cent of research being conducted in universities, the disruptions to higher education will challenge us to find opportunity in change. The intense pressure on budgets is not going away. Our libraries tell us they need to do more with less and it’s up to companies like ProQuest to bring efficiencies that do exactly that. We must all be willing to change direction, incorporate new technologies and ideas, and embrace new realities. We have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Frankly, that’s where impactful ideas are created and where the job and customer interaction is the most exciting and fulfilling.
Interview by Tim Gillett @researchinfo
www.researchinformation.info
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