16 August 2016 – Dr. Sharon Tan, Prof Teo Hock Hai and their collaborator Dr. Tong Yu have received the AIS SIGHealth 2016 Annual Best Paper Meritorious Mention for their paper ‘The road to early success: Impact of system use in the swift response phase’.
The award was presented at the SIGHealth Annual Business Meeting which was held at the 22nd Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2016) in San Diego, California, USA, in mid-August. Thirteen submissions were assessed on their innovation, impact, implementation, appeal and readability for this award.
The paper is based on a 2-year field research project on the implementation of a clinical system for medication administration at a public hospital in Singapore. Many organisations experience a "performance dip" immediately after the implementation of an enterprise system, followed by a period of improvement before normal use is reached.
Describing the study, Dr. Tan said, "The goal of our paper was to understand how success could be achieved in the period immediately following enterprise systems implementation, a period we termed as the Swift-Response Phase (SRP). Our study emphasizes the importance of dichotomizing the shakedown phase into the SRP and the Steady Adjustment Phase (SAP) to enable the proper management of SRP. We found that in the SRP stage, simply using the system alone would not enhance users’ work performance as users are still undergoing steep learning curve and tend to struggle even with the simplest system functions. Different system usage behaviors must be supported by the appropriate support structures in order for user performance to be enhanced. In particular, we found that the suitability of impersonal support (e.g. documentation of standard workflows) moderated the effects of standardized system use and individual adaption on work performance whereas the availability of personal (e.g. peer) support only moderated the effect of non-standardized system use on performance."
"This paper is significant because to our best knowledge, it is the first paper to define and conceptualize the SRP and dichotomize the shakedown phase into the SRP and SAP. This study also makes a breakthrough by conceptualizing the theoretical relationship and empirically validating the discriminating alignment between information systems user-related activity and support structures in enhancing system users’ work performance in the SRP," explained Dr. Tan.