What is IS and What does it Do?

Information Systems (IS) is responsible for ensuring that MIT's information technology (I/T) resources are aligned with the Institute's strategic priorities while ensuring that I/T services are consistent, reliable, easy to use, and operated productively and cost-efficiently.

IS fulfills an essential role in furthering MIT's core missions of education, research, and service by working in partnership with members of the MIT community to apply and help them apply I/T to reach their goals. Every year, IS receives some 100,000 requests for help and service changes, ranging from upgrading telephone service to installing a new office computing environment to assisting faculty in using computers in their teaching. Faculty, students, and staff in academic departments interact with IS in obvious ways daily: they call the Computing Help Desk with Macintosh, PC, hardware or software questions, or they call the Business Liaison Team (BLT) with questions about business applications. But departments also rely on IS in more intrinsic ways. When anyone at MIT turns on a computer – in an office, in an Athena cluster, in a lab – and sees the network; when someone picks up a telephone receiver and hears a dial tone; when someone backs up the documents and data on their computer to the data center in Building W91, they are interacting with IS.

IS's goal is to provide a world-class technological environment for MIT's world-class faculty and students and staff. To this end, IS provides "commons" services such as computing help, voice and data network connectivity, data storage, software acquisition and support, and the Athena computing environment. IS's services range from strategic partnerships at the MIT-wide level to operational services and support at the departmental and individual level.

Making use of I/T requires resources: physical resources (such as space for staff and equipment including phone closets in departments, laboratories, and centers); human resources (such as staff time for training, retraining, and problem resolution); and monetary resources (such as equipment, and software acquisition and renewal). Many of IS's wide range of services are freely provided to departments, but others (such as telephone and network services) are provided on a cost-recovery basis or through competitive rates to cover the costs of these resources.

You can find additional information about IS, its organization and services, at http://web.mit.edu/is/, or you can contact Professor James D. Bruce, Vice President for Information Systems (jdb@mit.edu, 3-3103). You can find information specifically about academic computing services and support at http://web.mit.edu/acs/instr-comp.html, or you can contact Dr. Vijay Kumar, Director of Academic Computing (vkumar@mit.edu, 3-8004).