Rosetta Stone IT chief deciphers digital transformation, challenges

Many people equate today’s Rosetta Stone, the language-learning company — as opposed to the 2,212-year-old one, the inscribed granite slab — with an enduring symbol of the 1990s and early 2000s: CDs. On them was software that taught Spanish, Italian and French and other tongues, and they came in bright-yellow boxes and were stocked on bookstore shelves.

That’s an image that Mark Moseley, vice president of IT at the Arlington, Va., company, has been working to change. In recent years Rosetta Stone has morphed from a shipper of physical products to a deliverer of digital ones — software-as-a-service (SaaS) language courses.

As the company’s business model shifted, so has IT. It has moved a chunk of its operations to the cloud so it can move nimbly onto new technology and help the company’s corps of developers get new services in front of customers as quickly as possible. But moving from supporting the business to helping drive it has posed significant digital transformation challenges…