IT - Invented Here

The BS program in Information Technology officially began accepting students in the fall of 1992, but the department's faculty began considering and designing the curriculum in the late 1980's. At that time we noticed great opportunities for technology professionals who could "make things work" in the environments of networked microcomputers that were becoming commonplace in industry. Traditional academic programs like computer science and information systems addressed the skill requirements of these professionals only tangentially, so we created the Information Technology program to address this market more directly. As the first such program in the country, RIT's IT program has been a leader in defining information technology as both an academic discipline and a profession.

Since the IT program’s inception in 1992, the explosive growth of the World Wide Web and its universal acceptance has revolutionized our society in general and the computing landscape in particular. Nowadays, the typical user of a computer neither knows, nor needs to know, very much about how a computer works in order to use it. What these users desperately need, however, is a “user’s advocate” to help them decide what technology is appropriate for their needs, and to help them adapt, integrate, deploy and use that technology effectively. The information technologist is that user’s advocate. From game developers and Web masters to network and system administrators to database specialists and application developers, information technologists are the key agents in the societal revolution that is changing us from an industrial society to a digital/information society.

In the spring of 2003, the Association for Computing Machinery created the Special Interest Group for Information Technology Education (SIGITE), which finally recognizes Information Technology as a formal academic discipline that is distinct from Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Information Systems. RIT’s Information Technology department is a major player in this “SIG,” and through it we have worked to develop professional accreditation guidelines and model curricula for Information Technology. The fruits of these labors were realized in July, 2005, when RIT’s B.S. Information Technology and B.S. Applied Networking and System Administration programs were in the first group of Information Technology Programs to be accredited by the Computing Accreditation Commission of ABET, 111 Market Place, Suite 1050, Baltimore, MD 21202-4012 - telephone: (410)347-7700.