Cloud Computing Business Value and Human Determinants: An Empirical Investigation

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.