IST Strategic Plan

IST@PENNSTATE: Vision

By 2015, the College of Information Sciences and Technology will be known globally as IST@PENNSTATE; this will connote a premier brand in the i-field and in higher education.

We will have evolved into a program that is world-renowned for state-of-the-art learning through undergraduate curricula based on principles and fundamentals taught at the lower levels, which are then used for practice and application at upper levels.

We will have a graduate program that produces top-flight young professionals who do leading-edge research and scholarship.

IST’s success will be based upon the realization that the educational enterprise for the twenty-first century is made up of a network of partnerships between people and organizations; partnerships which start inside the college, extend though the University as a whole and then branch out to other institutions and organizations – business, government, and foundations – nationally, and around the world.

In 2015, we will have established the academic brand – IST@PENN STATE – as the leader in the field achieved through partnerships for excellence.

IST@PENNSTATE: Mission

Through our teaching, research and service, our people will change the world with inspired solutions based on humanized technologies and the conversion of data to information, information to knowledge, and knowledge to wisdom. In doing so, we will empower people, organizations, and communities to make the best decisions that can be made.

For the Information Age

Through our work, we and others will not only better understand the information age—we will become true thought leaders affecting the course of development of the digital, global society.

IST@PENNSTATE: Goals

• Embrace the reality that everything we do, we do as a partnership, and that our global success lies in achieving success from the level of individuals to that of organizations;
• Educate information professionals who are uniquely able to use information and technology innovatively, insightfully, ethically, and creatively to synthesize new knowledge and to design the innovative technology and systems necessary to solve the most pressing problems that business, education, government, and society face in the first half of this century and beyond;
• Do research, teaching, and outreach that will foster the deeper understanding and better innovation needed to solve the millennial problems that we face as a society, including the rising cost and contention for available energy and resources, global warming, world population growth and changing population demographics, international conflicts, political violence and terrorism, and the overwhelming flows of data and information;
• Achieve excellence in the information sciences and technology field and beyond, and in all aspects of our mission at the nexus of people, information, and society so that we are undisputedly the best i-school at the conversion of theory into action and action into practice;
• Diversify the college so that it is well prepared to weather the storms that will face us in the not too distant future from the downward trend in student demographics in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, to the continuing upward cost of education. The college should be “built to last” with a business plan that allows it to fulfill its legacy mission to the state and its people by leveraging its global position and intellectual currency.