In another big step toward spinning off its education division into an independent company, McGraw-Hill named a new leader of that division Friday.

Lloyd G. Waterhouse, a former executive at IBM and Harcourt Education, among other companies, will begin as president and CEO of McGraw-Hill Education on June 14. The move comes in advance of the company’s plans to make McGraw-Hill Education “an independent, digital learning and education services company” later this year. Waterhouse will report directly to Harold McGraw III, president and CEO of The McGraw-Hill Companies, which is based in New York City. McGraw-Hill Education includes its testing, educational software, and higher education and K-12 publishing businesses.

Last month, acting McGraw-Hill Education President Robert Bahash announced he would retire after 37 years with the company. The company also appointed Patrick Milano as the education division’s chief financial officer and chief administrative officer.

The selection of Waterhouse is a clear sign of McGraw-Hill Education’s intent to position itself as a technology company as much as a publisher. Waterhouse, 60, worked his way up from the software division at IBM to its director of global strategy. He then worked at Reynolds & Reynolds, a software company that focuses on the automotive industry, and later Harcourt Education, where he served a brief stint as CEO before the company was sold to Houghton Mifflin. Since then he’s worked at technology companies, including some in the education sector.

“My lifetime commitment to learning and to technology convinces me that it’s time to accelerate the transformation to digital education so that students, teachers, and administrators can reach their real potential and improve learning for all students everywhere in the world,” Waterhouse said, in a statement.

The coalescing of technology and publishing was on display earlier this week at the Content in Context educational publishers’ conference in Washington. Overall sales in the industry are flattening, with digital revenues growing and print revenues declining.

In 2011, revenue at McGraw-Hill Education dropped 6 percent while operating income dropped 12 percent year-to-year. Revenues in the school-education group, which includes its K-12 business dropped 14 percent from 2010. Total revenue for McGraw-Hill Education in 2011 was $2.3 billion.