Abstract
The widespread use of cloud computing (CC) has brought to the forefront information technology (IT) governance issues, rendering the lack of expertise in handling CC-based IT controls a major challenge for business enterprises and other societal organizations. In the cloud-computing context, this study identifies and ranks the determinants of role assigning and taking by IT people. The study’s integrative research links CC and IT governance to humane arrangements, as it validates and ranks role assigning and taking components through in-depth interviews with twelve IT decision-makers and forty-four Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) members, engaged as panelists in a Delphi technique implementation. The empirical results recognize skills and competencies as prioritized determinants of IT controls, while IT security, risk and compliance emerge as capabilities crucial to evaluate and manage CC service providers. Despite the study’s generalizability limitations, its findings highlight future research paths and provide practical guidelines toward the high technology of open-market IT self-governance. The latter entails the humane flows of collegial control and responsibility, as opposed to the inhumane flows of authority and power, under the sequestered technique of the bureaucratically-hierarchized IT hetero-governance
Highlights
Cloud computing (CC) has emerged as one of the hottest topics in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT) [68]
Contrary to the literature, which states that people need profound ‘technical competencies’ for integrating CC resources with internal systems [49], this study indicated that CC vendors take control of the technical part of the CC, replacing people’s technical competency requirements with business skill requirements
Based on the identification and ranking of the aforementioned competencies and responsibilities required for the successful adoption or migration towards a public cloud environment, our research suggests that CC entails a paradigm shift where organizations become catalysts of change whose role is to facilitate the transition towards a high technology of open market self-governance based on the dispersed hierarchy
Summary
Cloud computing (CC) has emerged as one of the hottest topics in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT) [68]. Governance in CC requires a new mindset that would challenge existing IT policies, roles and responsibilities and power hierarchies[4] In this respect, role assigning and taking in the CC user organization become very important. Research focusing on the elements that an organization can leverage on to facilitate role assigning and taking within CC user organizations remains unexplored in academic and non-academic literature [44] This has created confusion among CC advocates and practitioners, with the result that CC migration projects are fraught with challenges [70] resulting in many reported failed projects [69; 85]. The remaining of this article is organized as follow: Section 2 examines existing literature to build a set of elements for role assignments, section 3 outlines the research methodology, section 4 discusses the empirical validation and ranking of elements while section 5 concludes the article and provides some directions for future work
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