Zhou and Ge Develop Design for Crisis Management System

New research by TSYS School computer scientists Yi Zhou and Linqiang Ge develops artifact and design principles for a campus-wide crisis management system for dealing adverse events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing upon crisis management literature and the uncertainty reduction theory, their study, which appears in the current issue of Information & Management, develops a preliminary crisis management system with three fundamental components – dashboard, portal, and forum – geared toward aggregating environmental information, expert knowledge, and stakeholder insights. This immediate, integrated, and interactive campus crisis management system discussed in the study aims to promote organizational learning through knowledge acquisition, dissemination, and utilization while reducing stakeholders’ uncertainty about the crisis. "Through comprehensive evaluation, we further synthesize and summarize new design principles for prospective artifacts, including constructing a distributed crisis management network, capitalizing on data mining and knowledge discovery algorithms, and developing the adaptability of the crisis management system in various circumstances," Ge explained. The study is co-authored with Yaojie Li of the University of New Orleans, who was formerly a member of the Turner College's management information systems faculty. Other co-authors are Rui Chen of Iowa State University, and Jie Xiong of Appalachian State University.