CBOD

• About the CBOD project

The advent of cloud computing (CC) represents the next step in the virtualisation and “servicization” trends in Information Systems contributing in making organization even more agile by offering them the possibility to run “anything as a service” (XaaS) in IT. With cloud computing IT (infrastructure and services) gains an additional level of flexibility, allowing for instance for an organization to manage and operate their IT as a utility (as in the case of the supply of “electric power” or of water). More specifically CC can for instance allow them if they want to scale-up quasi transparently their operations (even for short duration if necessary), paying mostly only for the usage (transforming their fix costs into variable costs), and (out)sourcing their IT the way they find the more convenient (e.g. selecting and changing external providers). Yet at the same time, this setting confronts organizations with a variety of new issues encompassing many dimensions (technical, legal, security, economical, organizational or societal) that they have to address in a holistic manner. For instance the (absence of) localization of data can bring legal and security issues, and the transformation of the IT structure will have some important consequences from a business perspective (e.g. with transforming costs from fix to variable, subcontracting) or from an organizational perspective (e.g. conducting to transform the function of the employees).

It is needless to say that the IT department (but also the company at large) is not particularly well equipped to deal with this situation, even if we can acknowledge the fact that the role of the Information Officers has considerably evolved in the last years and that these officers are much more knowledgeable than in the past of the different disciplines. As a consequence, organizations have some difficulty to evaluate and compare the different alternative available to them, and finally to determine what are the “cloud computing” configuration(s) that are the best at fulfilling their needs and at the same time guarantying that all the factors have been taken into account. If reports (e.g. from McKinsey, Ernst&Young, Gardner, CIGREF) and consulting services are available to help companies making sense (of the non-technical perspective) of cloud computing, this domains remains new and complex, difficult to comprehend, and largely subject to a “hype” phenomenon.

On the academic side, many of the researches on Cloud Computing mainly focus on the technical dimension or the security dimension, and fail to provide a more holistic perspective. However we are now observing an increasing number of work addressing cloud computing from a Management Information System or Business perspectives (Marston et al. 2011), and more generally from a service science perspective (that can be considered as the nascent discipline encompassing the different domains). Frameworks are for instance proposed to model different information systems or business aspect (such pricing), that can later be used to help evaluate and compare “configurations” (Garg, Versteeg, & Buyya 2013), and guide the decisions process of selecting cloud services (Menychtas, Gatzioura, & Varvarigou, 2011), and later evaluate the success (Walther et al. 2013). Yet, the investigation of this non-technical perspective of cloud computing remains a work in progress, that retains largely the attention of specialists of each domain, and which operationalization in real world settings remains complicated.

We believe there is the need for a project that will be able to advance our knowledge on Cloud computing from an organizational and business point of view is a way that will be more holistic (taking into account the different dimensions and to articulate them), more comprehensible (easy to use by both researchers and practitioners), and more interactive and actionable (not only available via theories, but with “executable” models) than what is currently offered.

As indicated previously, this project will fill a gap by proposing cases and scenarios and some conceptual and operational tools that can help us to get a more holistic understanding of Cloud Computing in the perspective of Management Information System and business, and notably able at combining at the same time: (1) a holistic business perspective; (2) concepts and models that are comprehensible by the non-expert; (3) an approach that is actionable.

As of now, we are not aware of other similar projects, although we can mention some work at addressing some particular aspects of the non-technical dimension of the cloud such as Business models, the management of risks, or organizational dimension (see the previous “state of the art” section). We should also mention that a variety of the (mainly technical) projects founded by the European Commission in its different research programmes (Petcu & Vázquez-Poletti 2012) often include some activities addressing the non-technical dimension, such as in the case of the 4CaaSt FP7 European project in which the simulation of business models can be mentioned. However, in most of the cases, this activity is more peripheral, and mainly conducted in the perspective of the technical work conducted in the project (for instance, in the case of 4CaaSt, the simulation of business model is done so as to better understand the “business” capability of the 4CaaSt platform).