Information Engineering Elevator Pitch

the more i think about Information Engineering as a potential label for what we are doing at the School of Information, the more i like it. one of the exercises we occasionally engage in is the development of elevator pitches, trying to explain what the heck it is that we do at the School of Information. this problem of defining who we are and what we do is probably one that is shared be a few other young disciplines, but generally not so much by older and established disciplines. branding itself as a School of Information also does not help that much, the name is so vague that it explains little, and excludes few things.

here is my attempt at creating an elevator pitch for our program, based on the assumption that what we do is centered around the two basic foundations of Information of our object of study, and Engineering as the method of how we approach it, using analytic and constructive skills to improve the ways in which information is being understood and used.

Information Engineering is concerned with the study of phenomena, technologies, and tools in information-intensive settings. Looking at information from a variety of perspectives such as society, culture, technology, law and policy, and economics, it enables people to analyze, design and build in these settings, always starting from a thorough understanding of the options and constraints that are created by all of these perspectives. The specific value created by that approach lies in the scope that goes beyond any of the individual perspectives, which allows people to more completely understand the context in which they analyze, design and build.

well, that may be a little more than an elevator pitch, or one for a really long elevator ride. on the other hand, since South Hall happens to have the slowest elevator in the known universe, this might still qualify for an elevator pitch.

Comments

[Jodi Schneider]

I love the term "Information Engineering".

What about something simpler:

* Helping people find the info they need, and how to use it
* Helping design better *systems* for conveying and using information

What am I missing?

Could this be further summarized by "improving info workflows"? Maybe that's too simplistic!

[dret]

@Jodi: thanks for the comment, but to me, your description looks too static and too much like describing library science (which is one the one thing that's well-known to restrict our concept of information and services way too much). maybe i am reading a bit too much into the two points you're listing, and elevator pitches are always problematic because they're short, but my goal would be to come up with something that very clearly has a wider scope than library science. it should be more dynamic, wider in the scope of settings it is looking at, and less centralized in the approaches to how it is developing architectures and systems for these settings.