Dr. Lacity is a Walton Professor of Information Systems and the Director of the Blockchain Center of Excellence at the University of Arkansas. She was previously the Curators' Distinguished Professor of Information Systems and International Business Fellow at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She has also held visiting positions at the London School of Economics, Washington University, and Oxford University. She is also a senior editor of MIS Quarterly Executive and is on the editorial boards for the Journal of Information Technology, MIS Quarterly Executive, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, and Strategic Outsourcing: An International Journal. She is a Certified Outsourcing Professional ®, an industry advisor for Symphony, and a co-editor of the Palgrave series, Work, Technology, and Globalization. 

Her research focuses on the delivery of business and IT services through global sourcing and automation. She has conducted case studies and surveys of hundreds of organizations on their outsourcing and management practices. She has given keynote speeches and executive seminars worldwide and has served as an expert witness for the U.S. Congress. She was inducted into the IAOP’s Outsourcing Hall of Fame in 2014, one of only three academics to ever be inducted. She was the recipient of the 2008 Gateway to Innovation Award sponsored by the IT Coalition, the Society for Information Management, and St. Louis RCGA as well as the 2000 World Outsourcing Achievement Award sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Michael Corbett and Associates. She has published twenty-seven books, most recently Robotic Process Automation and Risk Mitigation: The Definitive Guide (2017, SB Publishing, UK); Service Automation: Robots and the Future of Work (2016, SB Publishing, UK); and Nine Keys to World-class Business Process Outsourcing (2015, Bloomsbury Publishing, London), all co-authored with Leslie Willcocks. Her publications have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, MIS Quarterly, MIS Quarterly Executive, IEEE Computer, Communications of the ACM, and many other academic and practitioner outlets.