Knowledge Management, e-Learning

e-Commerce

Decision Support Systems

To contribute to the understanding and improvement of organizational performance is my research goal. The guiding principle of my research is that it should be rigorous, theory-driven, and relevant to practice. I believe that the objective of research is to serve and guide practice through theory building, I also believe that practice leads research and that it is crucial to keeping research interesting and relevant. A brief summary of my current research projects appears below.

The current focus of my research is on Knowledge Management (KM). The ability to leverage knowledge has become a core competence of organizations to compete in the contemporary economy. My research plan for the next few years is to contribute to the theory as well as practice of KM from several angles. First, my dissertation focused on the issues of effective knowledge reuse at the individual level. The empirical findings suggested that knowledge presentations provides a useful means to develop flexible understandings of the knowledge contents in a knowledge management system (KMS); and that the effect of knowledge presentation is moderated by the individual's cognitive traits such as learning style and cognitive style. A set of knowledge presentation principles for developing flexible understandings were developed and tested in my dissertation.

Second, an implication of the empirical findings to practice is that KMS designers should employ knowledge presentations and consider individual traits to improve flexible understandings. For instance, in the knowledge discovery services, the properties of the knowledge presentations and the knowledge workers' cognitive traits can be added as meta-data of the knowledge source and the knowledge receiver, respectively, which in turn can be integrated into ranking algorithms to provide search results that fit the knowledge needs better. A continued stream of research is being built on this topic to explore the opportunities of employing the knowledge presentation principles in various KMS technologies.

Third, a particular challenge to managing organizational knowledge is related to its tacit and dynamic nature. KM research has rediscovered 'stories,' an ancient technique used by every culture to pass on knowledge and wisdom, as a useful method to convey tacit and context-embedded knowledge. Theories and relevant empirical studies on utilizing storytelling in the transfer of best practices are rare. Based on Case-Based Reasoning, a theory originated in computer science and artificial intelligence, and Cognitive Flexible Theory, a theory originated in educational psychology, my dissertation explored this area and contributed to the understanding of how to utilize this powerful method to transfer tacit knowledge.

In addition to the research in KM, I am also very interested in the research of e-Commerce. The Web and Internet have created, and are continuing to create, many possibilities for new business models. Augmented competitions have brought customers various benefits from reduced price and service time to enhanced customization and convenience. Yet, online market exchanges are characterized by uncertainties and risks. Establishing trust and providing trust-building mechanisms are crucial for marketplace providers to reduce uncertainties of online transactions. I am collaborating with other researchers in this area. A first paper in this stream has been presented at AMCIS 2007. A second paper targeted for the Journal of Academy of Marketing Science is under development. I have also collaborated on the research of file sharing technologies and their impacts on the business models of the music industry. A first paper out of this research is under review at the Journal of Electronic Commerce Research.

I have good training in the areas of organizational and behavioral theories, methodologies, and statistical techniques. The initial research projects will lead to further theoretical and applied exploration of these topics, which are currently ripe. I plan to explore these topics in depth over the first five years of my career.