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TopOrganization Background
The ABC Institute of Management, Lucknow (AIML) is one of the premier national level management institutes set up by the Indian government at Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh in 1984. The institute’s mission is to be a global, socially conscious and integrated school of management, contributing towards management development, both in India and abroad. In order to fulfil its mission, the objective of the AIML community is to strive for excellence in management education, consultancy, research and training. It does so by inculcating human values and professional ethics in students so that they can make a difference in both the corporate and non-corporate sectors.
AIML campus, spread over 185 acres of land, is planned to ensure that nature is maintained at its splendid best in order to provide the perfect ambience to the community’s academic pursuits. AIML also has its campus in Noida, which is being developed as a centre of excellence in executive education.
There are around 900 students studying at a particular point of time in AIML, including those in the first and second years of their post graduate programme. However, the intake of students has almost doubled over a short period of 4-5 years. It increased from around 250 students in 2008 to approximately 460 students in 2012. AIML possesses one of the most heterogeneous and gifted student communities in the country, who have many times excelled over their counterparts in other management institutes of repute.
The Organization Chart
Figure 8 in the Appendix provides a detailed view of the organization chart at AIML. The Director heads all the affairs of the institute and is accountable to the board of governors. The three Deans responsible for academic affairs, planning and development and Noida campus affairs, report directly to him. The Chairman of CAC reports to the Dean (Academic Affairs). Figure 9 in the Appendix shows the organization chart of the Computer centre. The CC manager in turn reports to the Chairman of CAC. The system analysts and CMC helpdesk (many of the CC operations are outsourced to CMC Ltd.) employees directly report to the CC manager. The CC at the AIML campus is also responsible for maintaining IT infrastructure of the Noida campus. For financial matters, CC (Noida campus) has to report to the Accounts Manager at AIML.
Figure 9. Computer centre organization chart
IT Infrastructure at AIML
AIML has a large IT infrastructure distributed across the entire campus and caters to the needs of students, faculty, officers and staff of the institute. The CC caters to all the IT services of the institute 24X7. It is spread over an area of 15,000 sq. ft., at the centre of the campus and caters to all the academic as well as administrative activities of the institute. It employs one manager and 5 other system analysts who are involved in the maintenance of IT services in the institute. Initially all the CC activities were handled by AIML employees but in 2002 the job of maintenance was outsourced to an external CMC Helpdesk team.
Hardware
The infrastructure at AIML Computer Centre includes a fiber optic backbone based campus-wide network connecting machines on heterogeneous platforms with 11 high end servers. The network provides accessibility of 1300 nodes to each of these servers for sharing different hardware and software resources.