Professor Natalia Levina Wins IBM SUR Award

NYU Stern Associate Professor of Information Systems Natalia Levina received the IBM Shared University Research (SUR) Award this spring for her research on vendor strategy, management and performance in global outsourcing. 

The award will provide $40,000 for the duration of one year to support Professor Levina’s research on global sourcing in the IT services sector. Together with PhD students Mingdi Xin and Ning Su, Professor Levina will study issues pertaining to pricing software and IT services, vendor strategies and advantages in delivering diverse types of IT services, and the role of managers’ background and actions in enabling effective collaboration.

Professor Levina’s research on global outsourcing and offshoring – currently a hot topic in the press – is the first of its kind to investigate the role of organizational and national boundaries in facilitating effective collaboration. She teaches an MBA course on global sourcing strategy, one of the first of such courses taught at a business school.   

The SUR program was established by IBM to award computing equipment, software and services to higher education institutions in order to facilitate research projects of mutual interest. The awards recognize the achievements of faculty members and are not contracts for services. In Professor Levina's case, which is rare, the award provides monetary support to allow her and her PhD students to collect and analyze the data gathered from multiple sources, including IBM.

Professor Levina was also awarded the best paper of the track award at the International Conference on Information Systems for her paper entitled, “Collaborating Across Boundaries in a Global Economy: Do Organizational Boundaries and Country Contexts Matter?”.