Joining the Affiliates Program

Dear Prospective Affiliate:

As you know, the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) was created by the UC Regents in June of 1995. We admitted our first class of students in the Fall of 1997. The purpose of this letter is to update you on the current status of SIMS and to invite you to join our Affiliates Program.

SIMS's mission continues to be to educate information managers who can organize, manipulate, and communicate information. These are the people who run your Web sites, intranets and data warehouses. They need to know how to use technology, but it is even more important for them to understand the human factors, design, security, process management, and other skills necessary to make your projects successful.

Many exciting things have happened at SIMS in the past 3 years:

• SIMS receives its largest private gift from Robert Glushko and his wife, SIMS Professor Pamela Samuelson. The $1 million dollar gift will be used for infrastructure development and to establish new fellowships for outstanding students interested in information policy, law, and commerce.

• Ford Motor Company contributed $350,000 to SIMS as part of their $3 million gift to the campus.

• Doug Tygar, John Chuang and Warren Sack joined the SIMS Faculty.

• Professor John Chuang was awarded a $1.5 Million Information Technology Research Award from the National Science Foundation.

Further information on these honors and awards can be found in the "News" section of the SIMS Web page.

We have worked hard to upgrade the School's infrastructure, and have been quite successful in our endeavors. Improvements have included rewiring the building's network, completing construction on a new $500,000 instructional classroom, upgrading the School's computer laboratory with new equipment, creating new office space for visiting scholars and refurbishing the doctoral student lounge. We are now well on our way in building an exciting intellectual and physical environment for research and education management.

I am writing you to invite you to become an integral part of SIMS by joining the SIMS Affiliates Program. This program, described in detail in adjoining pages, is a convenient way to keep in touch with the education and research work going on here at SIMS.

One of the major benefits of the Affiliates Program is the conference series. Past conference agendas can be viewed on the conference archive pages.

These conferences have proven to be so successful that we now offer them twice a year. Our goal is to provide and interesting and useful information resource for our Affiliates.

In addition to the conference series, we offer our Affiliates access to the knowledge base at SIMS, including software projects, research results and faculty and student contacts. See the SIMS Projects page.

Sincerely,

AnnaLee Saxenian, Dean