DOES THE AUGMENTATION OF SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS AFFECT USER DECISIONS IN CLOUD ADOPTION SCENARIOS? – AN EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH

Despite the benefits of cloud computing, customers are reluctant to use cloud services as they have concerns about data security and privacy. Many of these concerns arise due to the lack of transparen-cy. Consequently, bridging the existing information asymmetry and, thus, fostering trust in the cloud provider is of high relevance. As service level agreements are an important trust building factor and due to their technical and complex nature, the augmentation of these is promising. Therefore, we in-vestigate the effects of augmenting service level agreements (by means of augmented browsing) on the ease of the information gathering process and simultaneously on perceived information overload, comprehension and transparency in a web-based experiment. The results of our online experiment do not confirm our assumed positive effects of augmentation. Nonetheless, we show that the ease of gath-ering information about a cloud service positively influences the perceived trustworthiness. Further-more, we demonstrate that the perceived trustworthiness of a cloud computing provider largely deter-mines the intention to use its services. Thus, besides improving security, cloud providers not only have to communicate trust-critical information but also have to identify suitable measures of information provisioning that considerably improve transparency while lowering information overload

Actas da 10ª Conferência sobre Redes de Computadores

Universidade do MinhoCCTCCentro AlgoritmiCisco SystemsIEEE Portugal Sectio

The long sale: future-setting strategies for enterprise technologies

Markets for enterprise technologies are complex socio-technical arrangements where the nature of the goods or services available for exchange is frequently uncertain. Early offerings may appear obfuscated, in part ontologically due to contested boundary definitions, and in part through the intentional and unintentional work of sales actors. While it is difficult for actors to know what they are transacting with certainty before an exchange occurs, expectations are partly shaped in practice during a protracted and multipartite sales process. In the early stages, such technologies may be nothing more than ‘slideware’ or ‘vapourware’, with the promise of the offering yet to be realised. Suppliers are therefore faced with the challenge of how to bring an immature product to the serious attention of users. One such example which has dominated the ICT landscape in recent times is ‘cloud computing’, a vision for on-demand utility computing which on the one hand promised computing resources accessible like an infrastructure commodity such as electricity, but on the other declared by some as simply everything we already do in computing today. This thesis offers a longitudinal case study of the way in which a major ICT supplier, IBM, attempted to galvanise the market for its cloud-enabled products amongst user organisations. In doing so the supplier had the challenge of selling a model of outsourced services to organisations with deeply embedded ICT systems around which the sales processes had to be made to fit. The research centers on four empirical chapters which bring together contextual narratives of cloud computing, findings related to the sales work users do, the sales challenges encountered during crisis management, and the shadow activity that occurs during professional user groups and conferences. The discussion explains how actors work together to construct an imagined community of technology artefacts and practices that extends our understanding of how technology constituencies hold together without overt forms of control. The study draws together a number of years of fieldwork investigating user group events in the corporate ICT arena and a major UK customer implementation. These are explored through a mobile ethnography under the banner of a Biography of Artefacts and Practices (Pollock & Williams, 2008) making use of participant observation, and selective interviewing, with a particular focus on naturally occurring data