# The "Business" of Pismere

Slightly modified from the Educational Technology Council Report:

The MIT Information Systems organization (IS) follows one overarching principle in allocating academic computing resources: the Academic Computing Environment should contribute to the continuing improvement of education at MIT. Among opportunities for educational improvement, IS attempts to support those that achieve as many of the following four ends as possible:

1. Serve many students, rather than few.
2. Serve the core of the MIT curriculum rather than its periphery, including General Institute Requirements and large introductory subjects in popular departments.
3. Seek innovation and creativity, rather than simple automation of traditional approaches to education.
4. Increase technological equity among departments, rather than decrease it.

Pismere is a response to one of the limitations of Athena which was enumerated in MIT's Education Technology Council's report.

Among the most crucial limitations of Athena, as we look towards the future, are:

3. Inability to make the most effective use of commercial software. The relatively complex process of integrating commercial software with the Athena environment required to ensure the secure and reliable availability of software, occasionally creates a barrier to quick, effective exploitation of the latest products-some of which potentially have great value to us-and sometimes requires us to continue to support homegrown applications when commercial products could now do the job more effectively and inexpensively. Operating systems and applications on Athena are frequently a generation behind to accommodate the integration with software resources and the file system, thereby making it difficult for some useful applications to make it to Athena.

Pismere does not try to address many of the other goals and issues enumerated in this report. However, it is expected to provide a foundation for making progress in other areas.

Although Pismere is sponsored by Academic Computing, people working on the project have always expected the work to meet the needs of many areas of Administrative Computing. Design decisions attempt to meet the needs of both user communities. The business model which will address how the Institute will actually pay for Pismere and sustain it is currently a task in the Discovery Process.