Dr Honglei Li

My career life is a journey of pursuing courage, creation and perseverance.

I did my first degree in computational mathematics, during which I was highly drawn to computers and algorithm. I often wondered whether we could build human features into the cold codes while writing computational algorithms. Fortunately, I got the opportunity to do my Master’s degree in information systems in 1997 when the Internet started to be popular. I was drawn to Management Information Systems (MIS) because it’s creative, innovative, multidisciplinary and full of challenges. My thirst and curiosity in MIS lead me to a PhD scholarship funded by Hong Kong Government in MIS at the School of Business Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

My PhD training opened me a variety of opportunities to reflect on the question I had pondered before when I was writing algorithms, i.e. whether human features could be built into computer systems. After training in research methodologies from management, marketing, operation research, psychology and social science, I decided to do a dissertation on virtual community participation from the interpersonal relationship perspective. My dissertation writing process taught me so much about human nature, research methodology and, most important, the human features in computers. I published several papers on virtual communities from my dissertation and am still working on interpersonal relationship theories in virtual communities.

During my first job as a Lecturer in Information Systems in the School of Business at Swansea University, I was drawn to business process management while doing virtual community research and teaching undergraduates MIS and systems analysis and design. I found that information systems improve our lives through business process changes. This interest leads me to my second research area -- business process management. Through an Erasmus scheme I have been trained at SAP in 2010 in business process management and moved to Northumbria University in 2011 because I wanted to teach MIS courses using a more practical method through the SAP university alliance programme. I became a certified SAP ERP business associate consultant in 2014.

With my ingrained passion in the field, I eventually sensed that the field is evolving with the technology development. I am recently shifting toward several emerging research fields under the umbrella of smart cities including smart city strategy, Internet of Things (IoT), online shopping experience optimization through data mining, smart city trace data analysis. Many of these emerging research areas are still under development and I welcome any interested party to discuss and collaborate on these research topics.

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