The phenomena resulting from the interaction between information technologies and social systems have been the central theme and the distinctive subject matter of information systems (IS) as an academic discipline. The emergence of new technologies fosters new breeds of social activities and behaviors. The new social behaviors along with accordingly-adjusted organizational strategies and structures and business processes in return pose new requirements and challenges to the design and development of new information systems. The primary IS research attention has focused on the inquiry into how technology affects social systems, namely the studies on the impact, acceptance, and adoption of information technologies. This main IS research genre seeks to investigate the most effective and efficient ways to take advantage of emerging technologies. Another important genre of IS studies, bearing a technical earmark in its scrutiny, tries to provide answers to the question of how technologies could be utilized to better fulfill the ever-changing requirement of society. This second genre with its conspicuous technical inclination, despite its minority status in IS studies, has become increasingly important to the overall IS research. This type of studies enables IS research to play a more proactive role in understanding the social-technological phenomena and shaping the future technological landscape.
 
My research situates itself within the second genre of IS studies described above, focusing on the technical aspect of social-technological interaction. More specifically, my research seeks to answer the question of “how can organizations gain more value from information?” Business managers have to deal with an overwhelmingly large amount of information generated by information systems. Modern automated business processes constantly yield an enormous amount of structured transaction-based information stored in databases, whereas the Internet, computer-mediated communications, and various collaboration tools produce unstructured information recording individual and group activities. Managing this information not only contributes to cost reduction, but also bears significant performance implications for marketing, human resource management, knowledge management, and strategic planning.  Therefore, extracting value from an organization’s information is a very critical yet challenging task for today’s businesses. Over the past 10 years, I have focused on two major types of research: 1) Using information to support individual decision-making and 2) Extracting insights/patterns from information. My research work has resulted in 11 journal articles published in leading journals for technical IS researchers, such as IEEE Transactions, Decision Support Systems (DSS), and Journal of American Society of Information Systems and Technology (JASIST), as well as in Information Systems Research (ISR), which targets a broader IS audience. The academic impact of my research is evidenced by the fact that the citations to my work come from both top technical IS journals, including IEEE/ACM Transactions, DSS, JASIST, and more managerial IS journals such as MIS Quarterly. My work has also been recognized and appreciated by business practitioners and the government through awards and research grants.