Turner Business Faculty Trailblazers

Computing during Crises

Turner College assistant professor of management information systems Yaojie Li teamed with scholars from around the globe to publish two studies in the 2021 volume of IEEE Engineering Management Review, each of which deals with information technology in the era of COVID-19.  In an investigation of how the COVID-19 epidemic affects the U.S. information technology (IT) labor market and, accordingly, how organizations choose to hire IT employees in the current situation, Li teamed with Xuan Wang of the University of Texas – Rio Grande Valley, Thomas Stafford of Louisiana Tech University, and Daqi Xin of Nankai University in China.  This group of researchers compiled a dataset of 57,847 IT job postings from a large online employment website during the second half of 2020 in order to examine the relationships between pandemic severity and work arrangements (remote versus on-site), work schedules (part-time versus full time), and organizational sectors (commercial versus government versus nonprofit).  The findings indicate that the U.S. IT market is in turbulence, and for both part-time and remote job postings.  According to Li, “for governments and nonprofit organizations such as hospitals and schools, ‘frontline’ IT support professionals are highly prized, whereas commercial employers, including tech giants, are more interested in growing a remote IT workforce.”  For the second study, which asserts that effective crisis response requires sophisticated knowledge management in organizations, Li is joined by Stafford, Wang and Yi Zhou, an assistant professor in CSU’s TSYS School of Computer Science.  Li, Zhou and their colleagues propose an architecture – including its steps, outcomes and implications – in the form of an Agile Crisis Management System involving three specific stakeholders in order respond to shocks similar to COVID-19.  According to Li, “agile systems development capabilities for crisis response systems are important, particularly for purposes of tailoring a crisis-oriented knowledge management system to a rapidly shifting threat landscape.”