The Hindu Business Line : I-Schooling

The day was pleasantly warm and the recent rain had greened the sprawling campus of the University of Mysore. In her first-floor office, Prof Shalini R. Urs, Executive Director, International School of Information Management (ISiM) is reviewing the curriculum vitae of research fellows for her pet project, the new I-School.

One CV is of particular interest. The applicant has a Masters degree in Sanskrit with specialisation and skill sets in computational linguistics, and has worked with Microsoft on a project. One wonders what a Masters in Sanskrit would do in an IT company. But this is a new trend, says Shalini.

As she explains, today’s business centres on information and information systems. Even as the world is snowed under by ‘information’, demand for people with multi-disciplinary skills is burgeoning as they are needed to manage the huge pools of content being created. In fact, the need is for a new breed of professional with strengths in information sciences, information technologies and management sciences.

I-schools are academia’s response to the radical changes taking place in the global economy. The I-school movement itself is not very old — the first of the I-schools appeared just four or five years ago in the US, the UK and Australia. In the US, there is a 19-member I-school consortium that includes the Berkeley Information School, Washington University Information School and the University of Michigan’s School of Information.

Knowledge management

ISiM is part of the University of Mysore and was set up to help create a pool of professionals for the knowledge industry — knowledge management leads, content managers, data warehousing professionals, management information analysts, archivists, knowledge portal managers and, of course, chief information officers.

Engineering graduates are often faced with the dilemma of choosing between a management course and technology course for their higher studies. ISiM offers them the option of doing both through its M.Tech in Information Systems and Management, Shalini says.

Funded with seed money of $400,000 from the Ford Foundation, ISiM is modelled largely along the lines of a public-private partnership. It has received Rs 50 lakh funding from Bangalore-based Informatics India for the first phase of its building under construction, while the University of Mysore has provided the land on its Manasa Gangotri campus.

Much like universities in the US and the UK, research is an integral part of ISiM, Shalini says. With funding and collaboration from Rediff it has undertaken a Rs 1-crore OCR (Optical Character Recognition) project for Indian languages. Research would also focus on content development, collaboration tools and technologies, business intelligence, data mining and data analytics, information retrieval, natural language processing, human information interactions and digital libraries.

Working closely with industry ISiM hopes to foster pooling and sharing of resources, expertise and best practices.

Tie-ups with foreign varsities

It has collaborations with universities such as Dalhousie in Canada, Pittsburgh, Syracuse and Michigan in the US, and the International Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore.

Students with fours years of undergraduate education are eligible to apply for ISiM’s M.Tech programme.

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