Know ISiM

The International School of Information Management (ISiM), an autonomous constituent institute of University of Mysore, emerged from the realization that each new era and society demands new breed of professionals. Just as the industrial age, heralded the management sciences, the information age, is engendering a new domain – the information domain. The art, the science, technology, and management of information hold the key to business successes.

Joe Tucci, Chairman of EMC2 says ‘Everything in the world is either energy or information’. The information overload presents huge challenges to organizations and societies – to capture, organize, retrieve, and archive relevant information. Tim Berners Lee, the father of the web said, information management is the way forward in this age of information overload. Peter Drucker, the renowned Management Guru, said, ‘the emphasis will shift from the “T” in IT to the “I’” in the next information revolution’

So, what should the academia do? Thomas Friedman in his celebrated book ‘The World is Flat’ says, the right stuff to do for educational institutions in the flat world is to prepare the right graduates – who can help tell stories with technology, who can manage all the content that comes in via different media such as computers, cell phones, video iPods, and websites.

As IBM Attributes and Capabilities study (2005) indicated: Information is in silos and trusted information is not available and that is the information Challenge for businesses. Today’s business challenge mandates a fresh approach to information management. As Jim Grey of Microsoft says today we need Tools and systems that

• Make it easy to capture & present ;
• Make it easy to store, organize & access ;
• Make it easy to analyze & summarize

“INFORMATION”

To meet these challenges of the information age – universities around the world began realigning and restructuring their academic programme resulting in the emergence of Information schools ( www.ischools.org). ISiM was conceptualized and established in 2005, in partnership with some of the leading information schools in the US – the University of Michigan; University of Pittsburgh; and the Syracuse University.

ISiM is a new age school for the knowledge economy – established by the University of Mysore with munificent seed grants from the Ford Foundation and evolved on a public private partnership model. We are also defining a new educational model – inverse of distance education. Our students and the school are in Mysore, but our faculty and mentors are a distributed network of excellence drawn from our partners and other institutions. We follow a cluster- alliance partnership model.

ISiM is directed by an independent Governing Board chaired by the Vice Chancellor of the University of Mysore with eminent academics and industry stalwarts as members.