Information technology is a significant part of businesses and crucial for organizational survival in highly competitive environments. Due to the high rate of technological change, countinuous adaptation is an inevitable part of the organizational life. An increasing number of organizations are migrating their business to cloud services because of the many potential benefits. Current research about change management and technological change has however paid little attention to the characteristics of cloud computing. This paper aims to investigate how the introduction of cloud-based collaboration tools affect change management processes in organizations. To this end, we studied change management associated with the introduction of Office 365 from the perspectives of a change management service provider and change agents within user organizations. Data has been collected through semi-structured interviews with four consultants within this area and three respondents who represent internal change agents. The results of this study show that change in relation to cloud services is divided into two parts; the technical implementation and the change effort. This indicates that change management not necessarily needs to be performed in connection to the technical implementation. Furthermore, our study show that the flexibility of cloud services make it possible to use it in many different ways, why it is of big importance to identify user needs to maximize the value of the collaboration tools. Finally, the results indicate that the constant update of the software in cloud services makes it favourably to work with agile methods in change management, although the long-term goal should be to create the ability to handle continuous change within the organization.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-148189 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Bäckström, Sara, Lundberg, Olivia |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Institutionen för informatik, Umeå universitet, Institutionen för informatik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Informatik Student Paper Bachelor (INFSPB) ; 2018.17 |
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