About Information Systems

Distinctive Education

A Carnegie Mellon education enables students to connect different academic disciplines and to see how they draw on each other.  In business and technology, real-world problems – and their solutions – involve creative and innovative thinking at the intersections of disciplinary knowledge and practice.  Our multidisciplinary approach to Information Systems education is unique and our curriculum stresses the interconnections and diversity of thought needed to approach today's complex opportunities and problems.  The program's intellectual home in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences gives students easy access to leading edge education and research in a variety of areas: Creative or Professional Writing, Modern Languages, Decision Sciences, Economics, Cultural Analysis, and Cognition and Machine Learning to name only a few.  We encourage students to explore their own interests and develop new aptitudes as they discover interesting lines of inquiry.

Multidisciplinary Curriculum

The Information Systems curriculum covers these broad areas. 

System Design and Development Technologies and Methods
Builds and refines the skills necessary to analyze, design and implement cost-effective, useful information systems solutions integrating current and emerging technologies, contemporary methods and effective organizational practice.

Organization Theory
Develops understanding of how organizations, ranging from small groups of individuals to society at large, use information, and how they can be empowered and transformed by information technology.  Courses in this area help students understand how effective information systems meet key organizational needs, and how social, economic and organizational policies and behaviors can influence these outcomes.

Decision Making
Gives students the analytical background to analyze the consequences of policy decisions and management of risk.  Courses in this area build on the analytic rigor of the social and decision sciences  to develop frameworks for critical thinking, empirical research and economic analysis.

Professional Communication
Designers need to understand how the structure and presentation of information affects how well (and how easily) it can be understood and used. In addition, I.S. professionals are often called to facilitate communications between software engineers and non-technical business clients; consequently, the most successful information systems professionals are typically those with strong communication skills.

And finally…a Liberal Arts ‘Core’
Since Information Systems is located in Carnegie Mellon’s College of Humanities & Social Sciences, students complete the H&SS General Education Program.  The General Education ensures that students gain the well-informed perspectives necessary to grow and change with their professions, to interact wisely with the natural environment, and to be responsible and informed citizens in an increasingly technological world and a complex global culture.  The New York Times has cited our liberal arts core as "the most creative general education program of any American university."