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What is information management?

Information and information technology play an increasingly important role in our daily lives. At SIMS, we focus on capturing, organizing, manipulating, and accessing information more effectively. Our curriculum emphasizes the use of information technology as an intermediary between the producers and users of information.

We study both information and information management. Information can be considered a 'thing': an entity to be captured, organized, manipulated and retrieved. Information management is a 'process', requiring mechanisms to distribute, access, and use information, often among people in a group or organization, and often intermediated by information technology.

Information is important to individuals, but also central to collaborative groups, organizations (businesses, education, and government), communities, and society. Computing and networking have vastly expanded access to information in these social contexts. Information has become more widely distributed, chaotically organized, and overwhelmingly plentiful. This places a premium on the management of information: ways to turn chaos into organization, and ways to target useful information.

There is a need for a cadre of professionals who specialize in issues surrounding information and information management. SIMS was created to educate these professionals.

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