A contingency lens on cloud provider management processes
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A contingency lens on cloud provider management processes Severin Oesterle1 • Jan Jo¨hnk2 • Robert Keller3 Nils Urbach4 • Xin Yu5
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Received: 10 December 2019 / Accepted: 15 October 2020 The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Traditional ways of managing information technology (IT) service providers are no longer applicable as companies use more and more services provisioned in the cloud. Therefore, organizations are looking for new ways to manage their relationship with cloud providers. The shift from IT-as-a-product to IT-as-aservice puts clients in a continued dependency on cloud service providers (CSPs), making provider management a critical factor for companies’ success. In this paper, we (1) identify cloud-specific challenges in managing CSPs, (2) develop a corresponding process framework for CSP management, and (3) discuss and extend this framework. Our final cloud management framework comprises ten processes for effective CSP management based on a literature study and twelve expert interviews. Furthermore, we unpack three major contingency factors, i.e., client–provider ratio, specificity, and service delivery model, which influence the reasonability and configuration of the cloud management processes. Drawing on two specific cases from our interview study, we explicate the contingency factors’ influence. Thus, our paper contributes to cloud sourcing research by deepening the understanding of client–provider relationships and by introducing a viable CSP management instrument contingent on three salient factors of cloud service provisioning.
& Robert Keller [email protected] 1
FIM Research Center, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany
2
Project Group Business & Information Systems Engineering of the Fraunhofer FIT, Bayreuth, Germany
3
Faculty of Tourism Management, University of Applied Sciences Kempten, Kempten, Germany
4
Faculty of Business and Law, Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Frankfurt, Germany
5
University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany
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Business Research
Keywords Cloud computing Cloud sourcing IT sourcing Provider management Contingency theory Interview study
1 Introduction According to Balaji and Brown (2005), provider management in information technology (IT) outsourcing projects comprises the client’s activities to plan, control, coordinate, and maintain provider relationships. In information systems (IS) research, the management of IT outsourcing relationships is considered to be an essential factor that can make or break the outsourcing project (Lacity and Willcocks 2003; Ruzzier et al. 2008; Urbach and Wu¨rz 2012). However, provider management is always challenged by new management approaches such as agile project management (Wiedemann and Wiesche 2018) or new technological concepts. One of these seminal technological concepts is cloud computing. Over the past decades, cloud computing has emerged and it continues to change the fundamental characteristics of IT service provisioning (Buyya et al. 2009; Xiao and Hedman 2019; Keller et al. 2019). Cloud com
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