Abstract
There are reasons for seeing the impacts of cloud as emerging more slowly and over a much longer time horizon than many commentators are suggesting. One is that a technical innovation, or set of technical innovations like cloud, typically goes through three phases – invention, commercialization and diffusion. By 2013 cloud is still dominantly in the commercialization phase, though diffusion of parts of cloud business services, as with many Internet related services such as eBay and Facebook, could be very rapid. A second reason is that diffusion of an innovation rarely takes place at a steady linear rate. Rather research shows it tends to follow an S-curve, starting quite slowly, needing to demonstrate many attributes, and passing through several phases before being fully adopted [1]. Clearly, cloud will be on a far from frictionless journey towards having substantive impacts on individuals, organizations, sectors and economies. Finally, cloud and its developers and users are on a learning curve which will take considerable time to climb before the sizable impacts anticipated actually materialize. In our view, there are near term developments involving a relatively fast take-up of new services, together with supportive technical and contractual advances. Here the cost imperative will dominate, but organizations and providers will mature in their ability to manage services and learn better. This will enable them to move to more innovative uses of cloud computing at the organizational level. We see this learning strand as accelerating over the next ten years. Our findings in this paper draw from research that was conducted through 2011-13. This research included a survey of more than one thousand business and IT executives and 56 interviews between 2011-2 supplemented by 20 further interviews October-February 2013 (to be completed) with key international players in the cloud computing ecosystem. We collected insights from cloud providers, system integrators and users of cloud services.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Rogers, E.M.: Diffusion of Innovations. Simon & Schuster, New York (1995)
Lacity, M.C., Willcocks, L.: Advanced Outsourcing Practice: Rethinking ITO, BPO and Cloud Services. Palgrave, London (2012)
Carlo, J.L., Lyytinen, K., Rose, G.M.: Internet computing as a disruptive information technology innovation: the role of strong order effects1. Information Systems Journal 21(1), 91–122 (2011)
Hagel, J., et al.: Cloud computing: Storms on the horizon. Deloltte Center for the Edge (2010)
Venters, W., Whitley, E.: A Critical Review of Cloud Computing: Researching Desires and Realities. Journal of Information Technology 27(3), 179–197 (2012)
Greenhalgh, T., et al.: Diffusion of innovations in service organizations: systematic review and recommendations. Milbank Quarterly 82(4), 581–629 (2004)
Willcocks, L., Cullen, S., Craig, A.: The Outsourcing Enterprise. In: Willcocks, L. (ed.) Technology, Work and Globalisation. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (2011)
Whitley, E.A., Willcocks, L.P.: Achieving step-change in outsourcing maturity: toward collaborative innovation. MIS Quarterly Executive 10(3), 95–109 (2011)
Centre for Economics and Business Research, The Cloud Dividend – Part Two. CEBR/EMC, London (2011)
Eisenhardt, K.M.: Building theories from case study research. Academy of Management Review 14(4), 532–550 (1989)
Golden-Biddle, K., Locke, K.: Appealing work: An investigation of how ethnographic texts convince. Organization Science 4(4), 595–616 (1993)
Barzilai-Nahon, K., Mason, R.M.: How executives perceive the net generation. Information, Communication & Society 13(3), 396–418 (2010)
O’Reilly III, C., Tushman, M.: The Ambidextrous Organization. Harvard Business Review 82(4), 74–81 (2004)
Brown, J.S.: Does IT Matter? Letter to the Editor. Harvard Business Review, 109–112 (July 2003)
Carr, N.: IT Doesn’t Matter. Harvard Business Review, 41–49 (2003)
Britton, D., et al.: A Grid for Particle Physics - from testbed to production. In: GridPP (2004)
Zheng, Y., Venters, W., Cornford, T.: Collective agility, paradox and organizational improvisation: the development of a particle physics grid. Information Systems Journal 21(4), 303–333 (2011)
Traweek, S.: Beamtimes and lifetimes: The world of high energy physics. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1988)
Knorr-Cetina, K.: Epistemic Cultures: How the sciences make knowledge. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1999)
Olson, N., Willcocks, L.P., Petherbridge, P.: Making IT count: Strategy, delivery and infrastructure. Butterworth, Oxford (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Willcocks, L., Venters, W., Whitley, E.A. (2013). Cloud Computing as Innovation: Studying Diffusion. In: Oshri, I., Kotlarsky, J., Willcocks, L.P. (eds) Advances in Global Sourcing. Models, Governance, and Relationships. Global Sourcing 2013. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 163. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40951-6_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40951-6_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-40950-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-40951-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)