Cloud Computing

ICT 4123
Lecture 6
Organizational readiness and Change
management in the Cloud age

Faculty of Technology, University of Ruhuna

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 In order to effectively enable and support enterprise business goals and strategies,
information technology (IT) must adapt and continually change.
 IT must adopt emerging technologies to facilitate business to leverage the new
technologies to create new opportunities, or to gain productivity and reduce cost.
 Sometimes emerging technology (e.g., cloud computing: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) is quite
disruptive to the existing business process, including core IT services.
 And requires fundamental re-thinking of how to minimize the negative impact to
the business, particularly the potential impact on morale and productivity of the
organization.

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Transition the organization to a desirable level of change management maturity level by
enhancing the following key domain of knowledge and competencies:
Domain 1:
 Managing the Environment
Understand the organization (people, process, and culture).
Domain 2:
 Recognizing and Analyzing the Trends (Business and Technology)
Observe the key driver for changes.
Domain 3:
 Leading for Results:
Assess organizational readiness and architect solution that delivers definite
business values

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 Change can be challenging
 It brings out the fear of having to deal with uncertainties.
 This is the FUD syndrome:
• Fear
• Uncertainty
• Doubt

 It is a common, observable human behavior that people tend to become

comfortable in an unchanging and stable environment and will become
uncomfortable and excited when any change occurs, regardless the level and
intensity of the change.

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It is a Saturday morning in the winter, the temperature is 212C outside,
and you have been waiting in line outside the arena since 5:00 AM this
morning for concert tickets to see a performance by Supertramp.You
have been planning for this with your family for the past 10 months
since they announced that Supertramp is coming into town next
December. When it is your turn at the counter to order tickets, the
salesclerk announces that the concert is all sold out. What is your
reaction? What should you do now without the tickets? you need to
change the plan?

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Your reaction would most likely be something like this:
 Denial :You are in total disbelief, and the first thing you do is to reject
the fact that the concert has been sold out.
 Anger :You probably want to blame the weather; you could have come
here 10 minutes earlier.
 Bargaining :You try to convince the clerk to check again for any
available seats.
 Depression :You are very disappointed and do not know what to do
next.
 Acceptance : Finally accepting the inevitable fate, you go to plan B if
you have one.

The five-stage process illustrated above was originally proposed by Dr.

Elizabeth Ku¨bler-Ross to deal with catastrophic news.
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 In her book On Death and Dying, Elizabeth Ku¨bler-Ross describes
what is known as the “Ku¨bler-Ross model” or the “Five Stages of Grief ”;
 This model relates to change management, specifically the emotions
felt by those affected by change.
 The first stage of major change is often the announcement; there are
situations when an understanding of the five-stage process will help you
move more quickly to deal with the issue.

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 “That is not the way we do things here; or it is different in here... .”
People are afraid of change because they feel far more comfortable
and safer by not going outside their comfort zone, by not rocking the
boat and staying in the unchanged state.

“It is too risky...”

People are also afraid of losing their position, power, benefits, or even
their jobs in some instances. It is natural for people to try to defend
and protect their work and practice.

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The more common concerns are related to cloud computing, and some
of them are truly legitimate and require further study, including:
 Security and privacy protection
 Loss of control (i.e., paradigm shift)
 New model of vendor relationship management
 More stringent contract negotiation and service-level agreement
(SLA)
 Availability of an executable exit strategy

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The five driving factors for change encapsulated by the framework
are:
 Economic (global and local, external and internal)
 Legal, political, and regulatory compliance
 Environmental (industry structure and trends)
 Technology developments and innovation
 Sociocultural (markets and customers)

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 Economic factors are usually dealing with the state of economy, both
local and global in scale.
 Managers are often asked to do more with less, and this phenomenon
is especially true during economic downturn.
 Managers and groups are expected to deal with the unpleasant facts
of shrinking market share, declining profit margins, unsatisfactory
earnings, new and increasing competition, and decreasing
competitiveness.

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Following are sample questions that could help to provoke further discussion:
 What is the current economic situation?
 What will the economy look like in 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, and so
on?
 What are some of the factors that will influence the future economic
outlook?
 Is capital easy to access?
 How does this technology transcend the existing business model?
 Buy vs. build? Which is the right way?
 What is the total cost of ownership (TCO)?

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 This section deals with issues of transparency, compliance, and
conformity.
 The objective is to be a good corporate citizen and industry leader
and to avoid the potential cost of legal threats from external factors.
 The following are sample questions that could help to provoke
further discussion:
• What are the regulatory compliance requirements?
• What is the implication of noncompliance?
• What are the global geopolitical issues?

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 Environmental factors usually deal with the quality of the natural
environment, human health, and safety.
 The following are sample questions that could help to provoke
further discussion:
• What is the implication of global warming concern?
• Is a green data center over-hyped?
• How can IT initiatives help and support organizational initiatives to reduce
carbon footprint?
• Can organizations and corporations leverage information technology, including
cloud computing to pursue sustainable development?

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 Scientific discoveries are seen to be key drivers of economic growth;
leading economists have identified technological innovations as the
single most important contributing factor in sustained economic
growth.
 There are many fronts of new and emerging technologies that could
potentially transform our world.
 For example, new research and development in important fields such
as bioscience, nanotechnology, and information technology could
potentially change our lives.

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The following are sample questions that could help to provoke further discussion:
 When will the IT industry standards be finalized? By who? Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers (IEEE)?
 Who is involved in the standardization process?
 Who is the leader in cloud computing technology?
 What about virtualization of application operating system (platform) pair (i.e.,
write once, run anywhere)?
 How does this emerging technology (cloud computing) open up new areas for
innovation?
 How can an application be built once so it can configure dynamically in real time to
operate most effectively, based on the situational constraint (e.g., out in the cloud
somewhere, you might have bandwidth constraint to transfer needed data)?
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 Societal factors usually deal with the intimate understanding of the
human side of changes and with the quality of life in general.
 The following are sample questions that could help to provoke
further discussion:
• What are the shifting societal expectations and trends?
• What are the shifting demographic trends?
• How does this technology change the user experience?
• Is the customer the king?
• Buy vs. build? Which is the right way?
• How does cloud computing change the world?
• Is cloud computing over-hyped?

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 At the cultural level of an organization, change too often requires a lot
of planning and resource.
 This usually stems from one common theme:
 Senior management and employees have different perspectives and
interpretations of
• what change means?
• what change is necessary?
• Even if changes are necessary at all?

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 In order to overcome this, executives must articulate a new vision and
must communicate aggressively and extensively to make sure that
every employee understands
1. The new direction of the firm (where we want to go today)
2. The urgency of the change needed
3. What the risks are to
a. Maintain status
b. Making the change
4. What the new role of the employee will be
5. What the potential rewards are

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One of the important value propositions of cloud computing should be
to explain to the decision maker and the users the benefits of:
 Buy and not build
 No need for a large amount of up-front capital investment
 Opportunity to relieve your smartest people from costly data-center
operational activities; and switch to focus on value-added activities
 Keep integration (technologies) simple

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There are many different change management approaches and
models, and we will discuss two of the more common models
 Lewin’s Change Management Model
 Deming Cycle

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 Kurt Lewin, a psychologist by training, created this change model in
the 1950s.
 Lewin observed that there are three stages of change, which are:

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 It is recognized that people tend to become complacent or comfortable
in this “freeze” or “unchanging/stable” environment, and they wish to
remain in this “safe/comfort” zone.
 Any disturbance/disruption to this unchanging state will cause pain and
become uncomfortable.
 In order to encourage change, it’s necessary to unfreeze the environment
by motivating people to accept the change.
 Maintaining a high level of motivation is important in all three phases of
the change management life cycle, even during the transition period.

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 As Lewin put it, “Motivation for change must be generated before
change can occur. One must be helped to reexamine many cherished
assumptions about oneself and one’s relations to others”
 This is the unfreezing stage from which change begins.

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 This is when the change (plan) is executed, and actual change is
being implemented.
 Since these “activities” take time to be completed, the process and
organizational structure may also need to change, specific jobs may
also change.
 The most resistance to change may be experienced during this
transition period.
 This is when leadership is critical for the change process to succeed,
and motivational factors are paramount to project success

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 The last phase is Refreeze
 This is the stage when the organization once again becomes
unchanging/frozen until the next time a change is initiated

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 The Deming cycle is also known as the PDCA cycle
 It is a continuous improvement (CI) model comprised of four sequential
subprocesses;
• Plan
• Do
• Check
• Act
 This framework of process and system improvement was originally
conceived by Walter Shewhart in the 1930s and was later adopted by
Edward Deming.
 The PDCA cycle is usually implemented as an evergreen process, which
means that the end of one complete pass (cycle) flows into the beginning of
the next pass and thus supports the concept of continuous quality
improvement.
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PLAN: Recognize an opportunity and plan a change.
DO: Execute the plan in a small scale to prove the concept.
CHECK: Evaluate the performance of the change and report the results to sponsor.
ACT: Decide on accepting the change and standardizing it as part of the process.

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 FIGURE 2 :Deming’s PDCA cycle.
Source: http://www.gdrc.org/uem/iso14001/pdca-cycle.gif. 29
Imagine that your company is adapting cloud services to your
processes. As the manager of the company briefly explain how you
can manage the change for the staff using following models
 Lewin’s Change Management Model
 Deming Cycle

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