Informatics, with origins in the German word "Informatik" referring to automated information processing, has evolved to its current broad definition.
The rise of the term informatics can be attributed to the breadth of disciplines that are now accepted and envisioned as contributing to the field of computing and information sciences.
More recently, models of collaboration and representation and acquisition of collective knowledge have been introduced, driven by fields of social sciences (ethnography, sociology of work) and philosophy.
Information technology and sciences to have both created the need for, and play a role in, facilitating the management of complex sociotechnical processes.
However, the problem of managing a global supply chain still is a daunting task with numerous incompatibilities in information exchange and coordination.
With technology evolving continuously, the task of creating information standards for varieties of exchanges from the syntactic to the semantic is a challenge yet to be resolved.
The culture of learning has to encourage the appreciation of diversity at the same time looking for the core essence and canonical nature of the experiences.
It is this new complex world that we need to teach students, among other things, the ability to reflect on the information they use and how to handle this information, what it means to use (or not) computational tools, the need to create tools at different scales of inquiry and across disciplines, and how to view one's own discipline from an engineering informatics point of view.