Professor Sinan Aral Wins ICIS Best Paper Award

Assistant Professor of Information, Operations and Management Sciences Sinan Aral, who recently joined NYU Stern after completing his PhD at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, won the best paper award at the Association for Information Systems’ 2006 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), the most prestigious gathering of information systems academics and research-oriented practitioners in the world. 

Professor Aral’s paper, “Information, Technology and Information Worker Productivity: Task Level Evidence,” was selected from more than 600 submissions. Co-authored with Professor Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT Sloan and Marshall Van Alstyne of Boston University, the paper analyzes the role of information and information technology (IT) in the productivity of information workers, who by some estimates now account for more than 60 percent of the US labor force. The research results show that while IT and information flows help employees be more productive by changing the way they work and allowing them to multitask, multitasking beyond a certain optimal level actually reduces productivity, which underscores the need for organizations to better manage employee workloads. The study also found that as employees’ age, their comfort levels with IT decline and, as a result, they require additional IT training. In addition to winning the “Best Overall Conference Paper” award, this research was also awarded best paper in the “Economics of IT.”

Another paper co-authored by Professor Aral with Professor Brynjolfsson and Professor D.J. Wu of the Georgia Institute of Technology was also nominated by ICIS for overall best conference paper and was awarded the best paper in “IT Business Value Estimation.” This paper, “Which Came First, IT or Productivity? The Virtuous Cycle of Investment and Use in Enterprise Systems,” answers whether productivity causes firms to spend more on IT or if using IT makes firms more productive. The study found that the relationship between productivity and IT investment is a virtuous cycle. 

Professor Aral’s honors mark the second time in three years that an NYU Stern professor has received the ICIS best paper award.