Toward a campus crisis management system amid the pandemic and beyond

Abstract

This study develops artifact and design principles for a campus-wide crisis management system amid the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Drawing upon crisis management literature and the uncertainty reduction theory, we develop a preliminary crisis management system with three fundamental components: dashboard, portal, and forum, geared toward aggregating environmental information, expert knowledge, and stakeholder insights. This immediate, integrated, and interactive campus crisis management system aims to promote organizational learning through knowledge acquisition, dissemination, and utilization while reducing stakeholders’ uncertainty about the crisis. Through comprehensive evaluation, we further synthesize and summarize new design principles for prospective artifacts, including constructing a distributed crisis management network, capitalizing on data mining and knowledge discovery algorithms, and developing the adaptability of the crisis management system in various circumstances.