Cloud Based Organizational Designs – CBOD

Qualitative and quantitative approaches, simulations

Expected results: simulation tools and overall evaluation of cloud based practices

Clarifying the concept of the cloud and its main organisational design characteristics

Expected. A special issue of Systèmes d'Information et Management is under preparation

This project, inscribed in fundamental research, but with applicability in real world settings, aims at developing the management and IS community knowledge on cloud computing, from an organizational and business point of view.

Although Cloud Computing appears as a pervasive and disruptive technology promising to have a major impact on information systems in organizations, this topic has scantly been analysed in IS research until now and mainly from a technical perspective. Given the importance and the depth of changes brought by this trend of “cloudification” of IS in organizations, it seems important for both managers and IS researchers to increase their understanding of this phenomenon, in order to help organizations benefit from this new technological trend, and in particular comprehend in a more holistic way the different dimensions that are involved in the design and the operation of cloud-based IS.

This project will consist in elaborating a variety of means that will make significantly simpler the elaboration, the decision and the evaluation of cloud-based solutions from information system management and business point of view, and able to accommodate the need for an holistic approach.

More specifically this project will:

- Make an inventory of cloud-based research and approaches in the domain of managing information systems.

- Elaborate a conceptual and analytical holistic framework of cloud computing for organizations. A particular attention will be given at articulating the different dimensions, rather than considering each of them separately.

- Elaborate different means to model and simulate cloud-based design in organizations enabling a more active and intelligent exploration of Cloud-based solutions from an organizational and business point of view. The means considered include approaches such agent-based modelling, system dynamics, equation-based modelling, ontology modelling, and associated tools, with a particular interest to solutions that are very comprehensible (both in exploring and designing the models) (action led by Paris Sud)

- Provide a techno-economic model of cloud technology in relation to their dimensioning, and cost models, so as to inform the selection of the way services are offered and charged to the “customers”, and for instance to guide the choice of the most effective business models (action led by INRIA)

- Investigate issues related to Cloud Computing solutions adoption by organizations (action led by Telecom ParisTech)

- Build a set of cases and scenario able to reflect the diversity of issues, situation and perspective of Cloud-based information systems (e.g. business models, resistance to change, national specificities and international comparison, etc.), that will be also used to validate the approach.