Abstract
The previous chapter discussed developing the retained organization, suggesting ways forward for managing, harnessing, and capitalizing on cloud computing. What was not addressed, however, was whether in practice wholesale new forms of organization will emerge, harnessing cloud computing and challenging incumbents and existing players in their marketplaces. An influential paper by Erik Brynjolfsson and colleagues at MIT written in 2010 hinted that we cannot consider cloud purely in relation to old organizational forms: ‘Computing is still in the midst of an explosion of innovation and co-invention. Those that simply replace corporate resources with cloud computing, while changing nothing else, are doomed to miss the full benefits of the new technology.’1 This chapter considers the extent to which the benefits of cloud computing may reshape organizations themselves. The chapter leaves behind comparisons with existing data center and outsourcing arrangements, focusing instead on the potentially disruptive innovation cloud computing is likely to cause over the longer term.
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Brynjolfsson, E., Hofmann, P. and Jordan J. (2010) ‘Economic and Business Dimensions of Cloud Computing and Electricity: Beyond the Utility Model.’ Communications of the ACM, 53(5): 32–4.
Indeed, some argue that the term cloud computing emerged because of the use of the cloud to represent the Internet in such networking diagrams. See Regalado, A. (2011) ‘Who Coined “Cloud Computing”?’ Technology Review, 3: 140–8.
These perspectives are widely known within the study of technology adoption. Examples in the literature are: Bijker, W. (1995) Of Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs; Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
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Mark Benioff of SalesForce.com famously sold his software direct to sales departments and suggested that IT departments were getting in the way of the innovations cloud computing might bring. See Benioff, M. and Adler, C. (2009) Behind the Cloud — The Untold Story of How SalesForce.com Went from Idea to Billion-dollar Company and Revolutionized an Industry. San Francisco, CA, Jossey-Bass.
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For example, the increasingly influential Apache CloudStack offers a standardized open-source cloud-based IaaS service that allows services to be ported between different cloud providers.
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© 2014 Leslie Willcocks, Will Venters and Edgar A. Whitley
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Willcocks, L., Venters, W., Whitley, E.A. (2014). Cloud Futures: Changing the Form of Organization. In: Moving to the Cloud Corporation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137347473_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137347473_8
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