By Associate Professor Adrian Yeow, Provost’s Chair and Associate Professor, Accountancy Programme
- What inspired you to pursue research in your specific field, and how has your focus evolved over time?
My research interests are mainly shaped by my corporate work prior to entering academia. As I was involved in starting new telecom and Internet systems, products, and later companies in late 90s and early 2000s, I had strong interests in better understanding and explaining how new technologies are developed, implemented and sustained. After my PhD, I began research specifically in healthcare information technologies as my dissertation was focused on the roll out of electronic medical record systems in various US hospitals and clinics. At the same time, I was also involved in various digital transformation projects in Singapore and in Europe. Eventually, as more technologies were rolled out in Singapore’s healthcare domain, my research began to focus more on how data analytics and AI tools are developed and implemented in Singapore’s healthcare systems and more importantly, how are those tools impacting process and healthcare outcomes.
- Can you describe a time when your research led to unexpected findings or hiccups, and how did you handle it?
There are many times when research projects seem to fail to produce any interesting results or when access to certain research sites get shutdown before you even begin. In such cases, one just have to learn to be persistent and be ready to be open to new opportunities that may come along even as the previous ones become closed. My research is qualitative and exploratory in nature as such, it is not uncommon for us to sometimes uncover a lack of impact or unintended consequences of technologies. In these cases, we learn to systematically ensure that what we found was not simply an artifact of poor research design but to ensure that all conflating factors have been accounted for. In those instance, these unintended or lack of outcomes were important to our research sponsors and stakeholders as they helped them reflect on what could have led to these situations and help them rectify or consider other approaches to their project implementation.
- How do you see the practical implications of your research affecting your field or society at large?
Many of my studies are related to development and implementation of information technologies that are supposed to bring about positive changes to their organizations. One practical output of my research is to help document and analyze the best practices that these project teams used to bring about successful outcomes. Another is to assist the projects to explain from a theoretical perspective what are the factors or reasons for why some projects tend to be more challenging and how those challenges may persist or evolve. This thus enables the project teams to better understand their challenge and thereby develop more appropriate responses in how they develop the technology and how they implement the systems.
- What emerging trends or areas of study in your field are you most excited about, and why?
The area that I am currently hoping to study more is on the issue of AI governance within healthcare organizations. This is a ‘wicked’ problem because of the highly generative nature of AI tools and many of the governance structures and processes that organizations have in place are not well suited for AI tools. At the same time, there is a strong push from the government, the industry, and the physician innovators to adopt more and more AI tools. Thus, it would be interesting to study how AI governance is being developed and its evolution in the next few years.