The ISD Clinic focuses on evolving technologies and methods that while not experimental are still not yet widely deployed in industry. This balances the educational needs of the students with the practical goals of the constituent organizations. In particular, the majority of our projects involve business process analysis, document modeling, and Web services. Organizational capability assessment, technology transfer, and change management are also important themes in Clinic projects.

The Clinic provides resources to give students practical, hands-on, experience in developing, expanding, and refining information services. The Clinic's Executive Director facilitates student project management and facilitates collaborations across the campus and beyond. Students receive conceptual and technical guidance from the Clinic's Technical Director.

We do not encourage small, stand-alone toy-projects that will be orphaned once a student team graduates. Instead, our program emphasizes small projects that can feasibly see completion over the academic year. Big efforts are broken down into smaller chunks for incremental, year-to-year development, that can be assigned as self-contained tasks to different student groups. Thus, the ISD Clinic program helps provide coherence and sustainability to student efforts. Long after they graduate, we want our students to be able to point to real, functioning, and valued services that they helped to imagine and build.