Shan L Pan

• PhD - University of Warwick
• Professor at UNSW Sydney

A growing amount of information systems (IS) research is examining the use of social media to enable effective crisis response. However, existing studies have overlooked the impact of indigenous concepts, which play an important role in crisis response. Our study intends to offer an indigenous perspective to this research stream by examining how so...

Although information systems (IS) are increasingly used to provide sustainable solutions for tourism, our understanding of the social mechanisms whereby IS contribute to a sustainable visitor economy is limited. This paper fills the gap by investigating how organisations enact the affordances of IS in preserving intangible cultural heritage (ICH) t...

Information systems (IS) play an important role in helping organisations attain environmental sustainability targets, and how to use IS for sustainability transformation is attracting research attention. However, extant studies have mainly focused on such transformation of business enterprises, overlooking it of communities. Our study intends to fi...

Smart City initiatives are gaining popularity, but their Digital Transformation (DT) process remains unclear. This paper investigates the DT process in Smart Cities through an empirical case study involving multiple government councils. We examine how stakeholders coordinate resources across organizational boundaries throughout the process. The pap...

Digital transformation (DT) offers organizations the opportunity for operational and strategic innovation, leading to increased efficiencies and transformative changes. However, successfully implementing DT initiatives requires collaboration among diverse stakeholders with varying perspectives, motivations, and capabilities. This study explores how...

Public health surveillance based on data analytics plays a crucial role in detecting and responding to public health crises, such as infectious disease outbreaks. Previous information science research on the topic has focused on developing analytical algorithms and visualization tools. This study seeks to extend the research by investigating inform...

The emergence of Fintech platforms has revolutionized the way financial services are provided. And yet, in spite of their growing prominence in the global financial sector, there remains a lack of understanding of the competitive strategies that are appropriate for these platform‐based businesses, and the implications of those strategies for their...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is regarded as the next digital frontier in government, with many potential applications for economic development as well as sustainable urbanization. Governments have started experimenting with AI, but empirical research on how to leverage and implement AI remains limited. This study analyzed two cases of AI implementa...

The Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry globally has a long history of prudently adopting novel technologies to improve products and services. Yet the rapid development of digital technology currently taking place is threatening to produce a more disruptive inflection, or substantial jolt. This paper explores the state of rea...

Climate change is one of the most pressing global challenges facing society today, with potentially detrimental sustainability impacts on individuals, organisations, and societies. The impact of digital technologies on climate change is one of our key research priorities at the Digital Sustainability Knowledge Hub of the University of New South Wal...

Cities are critical in climate actions as they constitute the main source of greenhouse gas emissions. Climate-Intelligent Cities are digitally enabled cities that are climate first and climate compatible. The journey towards zero emissions calls for resilient urbanisation to weather the climate shocks as well as energy shocks that cities are bound...

Smart cities are expected to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of urban management, including public services, public security, and environmental protection, and to ultimately achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 for making cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. Big data have been identified as a key enabler in the deve...

Platform-based customer agility is the ability to leverage the voice of the customer on a platform to achieve market intelligence and to explore competitive action opportunities. Prior studies have indicated the critical role of customer agility in enabling the survival and prosperity of contemporary organizations in a turbulent business environmen...

We see the DSI research framework as a way to organise various streams of research being conducted to understand how digital technologies and platforms can be leveraged to address various social issues included in the UN's SDGs. This framework also provides an opportunity to integrate various theoretical perspectives, such as social intermediation,...

Big data analytics (BDA) is regarded as an advanced tool for achieving sustainable development as part of the grand challenges (GCs). However, it is not clear how BDA can be used by data scientists to solve the GCs with multisource data in a cross-disciplinary approach. Based on a case study of city-based dangerous goods transportation (DGT), this...

Information and communication technology is regarded as a critical means of addressing rural problems of information deficiency, ineffective communication and emotional disconnection. Most studies on information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) can be categorized as a top-down development approach and are often theoretical resea...

The recent pandemic has painfully reminded us the need for IS design to be informed by possible futures and conscious of undesirable futures – Within months, many of the nice-to-have IS functionalities have become must-haves; Technology solutions in response to the pandemic have raised privacy and equality concerns. Although design science research...

Organizational sensemaking is crucial to enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation. This is because it enables the focal organization to gain an understanding of the unique contextual issues within and surrounding the organization, and continuously monitor and reinterpret these issues so that the approach to ERP implementation can be modifi...

Wildlife management is becoming increasingly critical to improving the sustainability of biodiversity and the welfare of human beings. This paper uses affordance as a lens to explore the design of information systems that can assist in managing wildlife in protected areas. Through an action design research (ADR) study with a forest department, we d...

The recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has posed a significant threat to the healthy lives and well-being of billions of people worldwide. As the world begins to open up from lockdowns and enters an unprecedented state of vulnerability, or what many have called “the new normal”, it makes sense to reflect on what we have learned, revisit our f...

Advances in digital technologies are rapidly transforming organisations in multiple industries, including traditional firms. When adopting technologies to compete with digital players, predigital organisations face unique challenges because of their history and traditions. However, little is known about the role of organisational history on digital...

Work climate is a complex organisational phenomenon that has been studied from various perspectives in the past three decades. Despite its long tradition, research that pays specific attention to the work climate that exists in the digital economy is unjustifiably rare. Few studies have empirically investigated how a digital climate takes shape in...

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has created significant challenges for people worldwide. To combat the virus, one of the most dramatic measures was the lockdown of 4 billion people in what is believed to be the largest quasi-quarantine in human history. As a response to the call to study information behavior during a global health crisis, we...

Vendor capabilities are an important research stream in the IT outsourcing literature. The extant studies have generated rich findings on how vendors develop capabilities, but these findings have mainly been based on the condition of vendors improving their existing business. How vendors develop capabilities to move up the value chain has received...

In addition to innate curiosity, many of us also see scientific research as a way of making the world a better place. There has been a drive to better understand and observe the practical and societal impact of research, led by researchers seeking to find meaning and purpose in their work, as well as government agencies responsible for allocating r...

The purpose of the special issue is to foster and contribute to methodological advances of qualitative research, including new philosophical approaches and innovative research designs and methods that enable more profound, critically engaged, practically relevant, and reflexive insights into information systems and organizing in the digital era. Wi...

Under rapid urbanization, cities are facing many societal challenges that impede sustainability. Big data analytics (BDA) gives cities unprecedented potential to address these issues. As BDA is still a new concept, there is limited knowledge on how to apply BDA in a sustainability context. Thus, this study investigates a case using BDA for sustaina...

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are fundamentally changing the nature of work. Specifically, AI algorithms are challenging the humans in knowledge work. Therefore, while enjoying the benefits of AI, many organisations face difficulties managing knowledge work performed together by humans and machines. To date, there is a lack of empirical...

This study aims to advance research on crowdsourcing processes by exploring practices that foster collaboration between internal employees and external users. We conduct a case study of Miui.com, a crowdsourcing platform launched by one of the world’s leading smartphone makers and also a Fortune 500 company, Xiaomi Inc. Our findings complement prev...

Community capability enables a large number of rural citizens to cooperatively engage in e-commerce as an e-commerce cluster, and it thus plays a critical role in e-commerce development in the rural regions of developing countries. Taking the resource orchestration perspective as the theoretical lens, this study investigates the process for develop...

The perennial issue of information value creation needs to be understood in the contemporary era of a more networked user environment enabled by information technology (IT). This study investigates information value co-creation from the social informatics perspective to surface sociotechnical implications for IT design and use, since co-creation is...

Knowledge embodiment, taking a social informatics perspective, refers to the transformation of knowledge into a form in which its value becomes evident. Knowledge embodiment in robotic systems with artificial intelligence (AI robotic systems) actualizes the value of knowledge much more powerfully than other entities, potentially altering the connec...

Increased access to data and affordable technologies today has made business analytics within the reach of most organizations. However, many organizations are unsure of how to translate their analytics use into organizational value. While the area of business analytics value creation has become a popular point of discussion amongst practitioners, m...

Blockchain, the technology underlying bitcoin, is an emerging financial technology (FinTech) that is poised to have strategic impacts on organizations. Because it is a new phenomenon, there are few studies on blockchain, and those studies have focused mainly on the technology's potential impacts, whereas how to effectively implement it in an organi...

Social media assume a role in activism by enabling the powerless to voice widely shared grievances and organise unequally distributed resources. However, the predominant focus on the episodic effect of social media in the digital activism literature presents a limited understanding of how social media can play a role at different level of grassroot...

Intensifying competition in recent times requires business‐to‐consumer (B2C) e‐commerce platforms to develop operational agility for competitive advantage. Despite the agreement on an increasing competitive landscape, the process for realising information technology (IT)‐driven operational agility on e‐business platforms has received little scrutin...

Extant studies on digital entrepreneurship have mainly focused on firm-level characteristics and overlooked the external environment, ie, the digital entrepreneurial ecosystem (DEE). This study intends to fill that gap by exploring how a DEE emerges. We adopt the meta-organization theory as our theoretical lens and conduct an in-depth case study at...

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a promising new technology that can generate significant returns on investment for companies. RPA also provides a new business opportunity for BPO (business process outsourcing) providers. This article describes the RPA journey of OpusCapita, a BPO provider that first created a strong internal RPA capability and...

This study examines the emerging use of social media in complex social phenomenon, natural disasters. By adopting an affordance perspective, we focus on how local communities harness the power of social media in disaster response. Using an interpretive approach, we identify different affordances of social media and examine how these affordances ena...

Discursive strategy is important in engaging users when an organization-wide strategic change, such as an enterprise system (ES), is introduced. Although some information system (IS) studies have suggested the use of discursive framing, little is known about how such framing is conducted. Hence, our study aims to conceptualize discursive framing st...

The immense environmental challenges facing society today have necessitated a research effort toward exploring digitally enabled solutions for environmental problems. Only limited research exists today to inform our understanding on how technology could assist groups of individuals in cultivating collective commitment and engaging in actions for en...

E-commerce enabled social innovation is becoming increasingly important as a way of reducing poverty in developing countries and yet has not been studied much by the IS community. We utilize the concept of resource orchestration as a theoretical lens to develop a fit model that explicates how resources are orchestrated under the guidance of either...

In recent times, social media has been increasingly playing a critical role in response actions following natural catastrophes. From facilitating the recruitment of volunteers during an earthquake to supporting emotional recovery after a hurricane, social media has demonstrated its power in serving as an effective disaster response platform. Based...

This paper discusses the process of combining online and offline business units into a hybrid organization. While most previous studies focus on public–private hybridization, this study focuses on the online–offline type and discusses the combining process from the perspective of boundary permeability. By using Suning as a case study, we explore ho...

The emergence of Alibaba's Taobao (e-commerce) Villages in remote China has challenged the assumption that rural, underserved communities must always be the recipients of aid to stimulate ICT-enabled development. Based on an in-depth case study of two remote villages in China, this research note shows how ICT (e-commerce) can empower a marginalized...

In recent times, digital multi-sided platforms (DMSPs) have revolutionized electronic commerce by enabling new forms of competition and collaboration. Existing studies provide useful insights yet do not recognize the role of information technologies (IT) in examining the development of DMSPs. To address this knowledge gap, we conducted a case study...

Digital technology is increasingly being recognized as a catalyst for national progress and social transformation. Using an in-depth case study of social media-enabled crime-fighting communities in Malaysia, this paper explores the use of social media in bringing societal change through civic engagement. We adopt the notion of boundary object to co...

This teaching case describes the journey undertaken by the Beijing Capital International Airport's IT department in the implementation of various large-scale IT projects during the construction of the Terminal 3 project. The case specifically singled out the Airport Security system in the Terminal 3 project and provided a detailed description on it...

Many companies slow in adopting modern enterprise systems are catching up. An important agenda of CIOs of these latecomer companies is to redeploy slack resources into productive use. IS research, however, has not previously studied how to use IT to redeploy slack resources. Based on an in-depth case study of the digital transformation completed by...

Multi-sided platforms (MSP) are revolutionizing the global competitive landscape in the new networked economy. Yet, although these MSPs are underpinned by information systems (IS), there is currently little research on how the IS capabilities of the platform sponsor can influence, and co-evolve with, the development of the platform over time. The l...

In this paper, we examine the emerging use of ICT in social phenomena such as natural disasters. Researchers have acknowledged that a community possesses the capacity to manage the challenges in crisis response on its own. However, extant IS studies focus predominantly on IS use from the crisis response agency’s perspective, which undermines commun...

Green information technology (IT) initiatives cannot be implemented in isolation if they are to have a significant and lasting impact on environmental sustainability. Instead, there is a need to harness the collective IT resources of the diverse stakeholders operating in the interorganizational business networks that characterize the contemporary b...

The operational agility literature suffers from a lack of clarity in terms of the process or underlying mechanisms through which operational agility is achieved. Drawing on the information processing view of the firm, this study attempts to address this gap by examining the process of operational agility development. A process model of developing i...

Effectuation and causation are two contrasting approaches to new business development. We argue that these two approaches are generic decision-making mechanisms that can coexist with one another and that they are configured in specific ways during different phases in the process of new product creation. These decision-making mechanisms are influenc...

An ongoing challenge that enterprises currently face is that of fostering agile mindsets and behaviors among employees as necessary to achieve enterprise agility by leveraging IT. Although existing studies focus on the shortening business processes and adopting agile methods of system implementation, little attention is directed toward the “people”...

Multiple stakeholder involvement in Enterprise System implementations makes it challenging. Using Fiedler’s (2005) contingency theory of leadership as an analytical lens, this study examines the Organization-Package-Stakeholder (OPS) fit, managing fit between organizational functionality, package features and stakeholder needs during ES implementat...

During a series of recent natural catastrophes, social media has played an increasingly prominent and varied role in crisis response, ranging from facilitating the recruitment of volunteers during an earthquake to supporting spiritual recovery after a hurricane. In this paper, we propose that social media, beyond the conventional role of informatio...

The ability to change organizational routines according to the need of organizational transformation is difficult to achieve, but increasingly vital for an organization to survive in a highly turbulent business environment. However, despite fruitful research on organizational routines, how routines evolve through feedback remains unclear. This stud...

This paper is based on multiple case studies on the construction of the Beijing Capital International Airport Terminal 3 in preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games that investigated the processes of instilling agile IS development practices in large-scale IT projects. This study develops useful theoretical constructs that will help researchers and p...

In recent years India has become the information technology (IT) offshoring destination of choice for many Western organizations. From the perspective of vendor organizations in India, however, the IT offshoring phenomenon is more than just a business relationship with Western firms. It is also embedded within the context of the longstanding imbala...

Technology is the catalyst for sustainable development. In this context, a key challenge for technology organizations is to balance sustainable development with conventional, profit-driven development. However, despite its significance, such a balance has largely been overlooked in the extant literature. In this study, we examine this balance throu...

Modularity in organizations can facilitate the creation and development of dynamic capabilities. Paradoxically, however, modular management can also stifle the strategic potential of such capabilities by conflicting with the horizontal integration of units. We address these issues through an examination of how modular management of information tech...

IT outsourcing (ITO) has created new issues for engineering management. Of these, a persistent problem concerns the boundaries between clients and vendors, which have the potential to damage even the most trusting and secure relationship. The rising trend of offshore sourcing has further exacerbated the issue, because of the national boundaries tha...

Asia continues to lead e-commerce growth worldwide, with multi-sided platforms like Alibaba.com, 360buy.com and Taobao.com leading the race. Despite their rising prominence, few studies articulate how these multi-sided platforms in Asia service and collaborate with it sides. It is important to learn how platforms encounter and adapt to changing sup...

E-governments have become an increasingly integral part of the virtual economic landscape. However, e-government systems have been plagued by an unsatisfactory, or even a decreasing, level of trust among citizen users. The political exclusivity and longstanding bureaucracy of governmental institutions have amplified the level of difficulty in gaini...

Pressured by escalating costs, continual demand for high quality, and the speed of technological advances, the need for change and improvisation has become a critical priority for the healthcare industry. Now society demands that healthcare providers offer better patient care through the careful use of information technologies. For that, practition...

Operational agility has increasingly become essential for survival and prosperity for contemporary organizations. Given its significant role in a turbulent business environment, this concept has garnered considerable research attention over the past ten years. However, due to the complex nature of operational agility, how to achieve this important...

In the past two decades, organizational scholars have focused significant attention on how organizations manage crises. While most of these studies concentrate on crisis prevention, there is a growing emphasis on crisis response. Because information that is critical to crisis response may become outdated as crisis conditions change, crisis response...

The objective of this study is to provide a deeper understanding into the innovative approaches used in organizations to bridge the extensive gap between the general prescriptions of KM literature with actual initiatives formed in practice, revealing that what literature currently prescribes does not necessarily provide the organization with easier...

Interdependencies between business units are fundamental to productive activity and when present will only reinforce heterogeneity. On the other hand, incongruences between heterogeneous business units are likely to occur given role, socio-economic, demographic and communication characteristic differences. This article explores interdependencies be...

As e-commerce offers new channels for companies to reach consumers, it also brings about significant challenges to the ability to response to customer changing needs, which is named "customer agility". Both practitioners and researchers consider information management as a source of customer agility. Drawing on the information management literature...

The research presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of an e-Government system implementation. The resource-based view and the enactment concept were leveraged as a theoretical sense-making lens to study the system through its planning, development and operation phases. Consequently, a process model of resource enactment was developed to theo...