One of our UK TechNet readers, Christopher Latham, wrote to me a couple of weeks ago looking for help with some research he’s undertaking for his MSc Dissertation and the subject “Cloud Computing adoption in SMEs” is something that I’m really interested in so I thought it’d be great if we all gave him hand. Christopher’s survey on Cloud Computing Adoption in SMEs will only take about 5 minutes to complete but it’ll help him out a lot and provide us with some interesting thoughts.
I wanted to understand a little more about Chris so I wrote back to him to find out why he’s doing what he’s doing….
“I have worked in SMEs throughout my career in IT and there is a common conception amongst academics that they are best placed to exploit the benefits of the cloud through the “big little” effect, which allows them to enjoy the benefits of enterprise IT without the capital investment. I really wanted to see whether this is true, what the concerns of SMEs are in relation to the cloud, and what the level of knowledge is in the SME community regarding its benefits and risks. Moreover, I want to determine whether size really does matter when considering whether to move towards a cloud model – or whether SMEs have business concerns that are as relevant, if not more so to whether they adopt or not. Ultimately, I want to produce a framework which provides an amount of IT governance to SMEs around the cloud that fits in with the way they formulate business strategy, without it becoming particularly onerous or time consuming. ”
Chris is doing his MSc with the Open University and he’s going to release the results on his blog so we’ll be sure to make sure we let you know to.
“I have worked in SMEs throughout my career in IT and there is a common conception amongst academics that they are best placed to exploit the benefits of the cloud through the “big little” effect, which allows them to enjoy the benefits of enterprise IT without the capital investment. I really wanted to see whether this is true, what the concerns of SMEs are in relation to the cloud, and what the level of knowledge is in the SME community regarding its benefits and risks. Moreover, I want to determine whether size really does matter when considering whether to move towards a cloud model – or whether SMEs have business concerns that are as relevant, if not more so to whether they adopt or not. Ultimately, I want to produce a framework which provides an amount of IT governance to SMEs around the cloud that fits in with the way they formulate business strategy, without it becoming particularly onerous or time consuming. ”
