Young Researcher Award

Associate Professor TAN Cheng Yian, Bernard

Department of Information Systems

The Young Researcher Award is awarded to Assoc Prof Tan for his research in the field of information systems, particularly in the areas of group support systems and cross-cultural issues.

It comes as no surprise that Assoc Prof Tan is one of the few information systems researchers whose work has been published in every single premier journal in this discipline. As an individual, he is a people's person. As a researcher, his niche is in studying the impact of human and organisational factors on the viability of computer technologies.

One of his core achievements was the development of the task dimension in group support systems research. Besides formulating and testing theoretical propositions on how task variables could moderate the impact of group support systems, Assoc Prof Tan demonstrated how these task variables could be operationalised in research studies. This has led to significant theoretical developments in four areas of group support systems research: group polarisation, status differentials, task-medium fit and distributed work.

As one of the first researchers to emphasise the importance of cultural issues in information systems knowledge, Assoc Prof Tan carried out empirical studies to illustrate how theories with a culture dimension should be tested and refined, and how cultural variables could be operationalised in practice. The end result was critical theoretical developments in group support systems research on majority and minority influence patterns.

It follows that Assoc Prof Tan's recipe for success has very human qualities. Wisdom, humility, and networking are his three operational ingredients. In his opinion, a researcher needs to be wise to know which research directions to pioneer and pursue, to be humble in keeping abreast of the continuous evolution of new knowledge, and to have an international network of contacts to facilitate large-scale collaborative efforts.