Stepping into the clouds : enabling companies to adapt their capabilities to cloud computing to succeed under uncertain conditions

Cloud computing;Business enterprises--Technological innovations--Management

Werfs, Marc ; Bowles, Juliana ; Bowles, Juliana

University:University of St Andrews

Department:Computer Science (School of)

关键词: Cloud computing;    Business enterprises--Technological innovations--Management;   

Others  :  https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10023/15651/MarcWerfsPhDThesis.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y

来源: DR-NTU

【 摘 要 】

Recent technologies have changed the way companies acquire and use computingresources. Companies have to adapt their capabilities, which combine businessprocesses, skills, etc., to exploit the opportunities presented by these technologies whilstavoiding adverse effects. The latter part is, however, becoming increasingly difficult dueto the uncertain long-term impact recent technologies have. This thesis argues thatcompanies are required to adapt their capabilities in a way that increases the company’sresilience so that they are robust yet flexible enough to succeed under uncertainconditions.By focusing on cloud computing as one recent technology, this thesis first identifies theunderlying processes of adapting capabilities to cloud computing by investigating howsoftware vendors migrated their products into the cloud. The results allow the definitionof viewpoints that influence the adaptation of capabilities to cloud computing.Furthermore, the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) is applied to onesoftware vendor after the migration of their product into the cloud. FRAM enables theanalysis of ‘performance variabilities’ that need to be dampened to increase the resilienceof systems. The results show that FRAM appropriately informs steps to increase andmeasure resilience when migrating products into the cloud.The final part develops cFRAM which extends FRAM through the viewpoints to enablethe analysis of capabilities within FRAM. The goal of cFRAM is to enable companies to(1) identify existing capabilities, (2) investigate the impact of cloud computing on them,and (3) inform steps to adapt them to cloud computing whilst dampening performancevariabilities. The results of the cFRAM evaluation study are unequivocal and showcFRAM is a novel method that achieves its goal of enabling companies to adapt theircapabilities to cloud computing in a way that increases the company’s resilience. cFRAMcan be easily adapted to other technologies like smartphones by changing the viewpoints.