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Cloud Computing Business Value and Human Determinants: An Empirical Investigation

Published: 28 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

There are high expectations that cloud computing (CC) can generate sizeable business value (BV) for firms, which includes important benefits, associated with costs reduction, agility enhancement and innovation facilitation and support. However, limited empirical research has been conducted in this direction, in order to investigate to what extent these high expectations are fulfilled, as well as the level of business value that firms realize from CC, and the magnitudes of the specific benefits that firms really obtain from it, as well as their determinants. Our paper contributes to filling this research gap. It investigates the effect of a set of human factors, which concern firm's general human capital, ICT specific human capital, as well the co-operation and relationship between the personnel of the ICT unit and the personnel of the business units, on the BV generated by CC, having as theoretical foundation the 'resource-based view' of the firm theory. For this purpose, we have used data collected through a survey from 115 firms from technologically developed sectors of the Greek economy, from which a CC BV regression model has been estimated. It has been concluded that neither firm's general human capital (quantified by the share of firm's employees having tertiary-level formal education), nor its ICT human capital (quantified by the share of ICT employees), per se impact the BV generated by CC.
On the contrary, the relationship and co-operation between the ICT unit personnel and the business units' personnel have a positive effect on the BV from CC usage. Our findings indicate that it is not the mere acquisition of human resources (highly educated business and ICT employees), but their utilization for the development of capability for productive and effective co-operation and relationship among the ICT and business personnel, that can lead to higher levels of BV from CC usage.

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  • (2022)Exploitative or explorative innovation? An event study of cloud computing business valueElectronic Commerce Research10.1007/s10660-021-09473-022:4(1467-1490)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2022
  • (2021)Efficiency or Innovation?Journal of Global Information Management10.4018/JGIM.28761029:6(1-23)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2021
  • (2021)Reference Business Processes-Based Method for Multi-Tenant SaaS Architecture Deployment and Adaptation2021 28th Conference of Open Innovations Association (FRUCT)10.23919/FRUCT50888.2021.9347630(264-270)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2021

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cover image ACM Other conferences
PCI '17: Proceedings of the 21st Pan-Hellenic Conference on Informatics
September 2017
322 pages
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

In-Cooperation

  • Greek Com Soc: Greek Computer Society
  • University of Thessaly: University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 September 2017

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Author Tags

  1. Cloud computing
  2. benefits
  3. business value
  4. human capital
  5. human resources
  6. relationship

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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PCI 2017
PCI 2017: 21st PAN-HELLENIC CONFERENCE ON INFORMATICS
September 28 - 30, 2017
Larissa, Greece

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Overall Acceptance Rate 190 of 390 submissions, 49%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Exploitative or explorative innovation? An event study of cloud computing business valueElectronic Commerce Research10.1007/s10660-021-09473-022:4(1467-1490)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2022
  • (2021)Efficiency or Innovation?Journal of Global Information Management10.4018/JGIM.28761029:6(1-23)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2021
  • (2021)Reference Business Processes-Based Method for Multi-Tenant SaaS Architecture Deployment and Adaptation2021 28th Conference of Open Innovations Association (FRUCT)10.23919/FRUCT50888.2021.9347630(264-270)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2021

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