الملخص الإنجليزي
Over the last decade, rapid advancement has been taking place in the domain of Information
and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Such an advancement in turn makes major changes
in the service, function, and the way organizations operate. Cloud computing (CC) represents
one such technology, which is considered a major disruptive innovation, that enables business
users to access and use IT-enabled business services as per their demand using the Internet.
CC is further known to have a considerable impact at three levels: organizational, business
process, and employee. A rich body of literature currently exists that largely focuses on how
the impact of CC adoption is reflected at organizational and business process levels. In
contrast, relatively little research has so far been undertaken to explain how the impact of CC
is manifested in terms of changes occurring in the information technology department (ITD)
that has traditionally been responsible for meeting the information requirements of all levels
of management across an organization
Against this backdrop, this research study has been undertaken to investigate the impact of the
organizational introduction of CC on three major attributes of ITD: role of ITD, functions and
key tasks performed by the ITD, and quality of IT services delivered by the IT department.
Addressing such an impact is necessary in order to revisit the existing alignment between IT
functions with business strategy, as misalignments can occur, triggered by CC-enabled
changes in the attributes of the ITD. A research model has thus been developed by drawing
on a review of the existing related literature. The proposed model has been qualitatively
evaluated using a multiple case study approach and data analyzed using the pattern matching
technique. The case study findings confirm that the adoption of cloud-based systems has
affected the role and function of the ITD. In particular, the nature of the work performed by
the IT staff has been modified. The findings further confirm that the ITD is now responsible
for maintaining the relationship with a cloud service vendor and managing services received
by that vendor. Additionally, the findings confirm an improvement in the quality of IT
services. Overall, these findings thus empirically support the model. This study assists IT
practitioners and ICT researchers' community alike in developing a richer understanding
about the impact of CC on ITD. Despite this, the findings of this study cannot be generalized
across the entire tertiary education sector of Oman; hence a call is made to encourage other
researchers to replicate and even extend this study to all tertiary educational institutions in
Oman.
