Digital Transformation Management

3 types

- Independant (hierarchy) --> strategic competence

- Arm's length (market) --> cost efficiency

- Embedded (network) --> technology catalysis

• Firms desiring cost efficiency in their outsourcing relationships may best be served by arm’s-length relationships. (selective outsourcing, medium duration)
• Those wishing to gain access to technology expertise to catalyze their business, may need  to develop network type-of relationships with their providers (comprehensive, long term outsourcing)

Type of outsourcing and how this is performed is subject to strategic alignment. Configurational approaches are superior in explaining the outsourcing success compared to the factoral aspects

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared  pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that  can be rapidly provisioned.

Types:

• SaaS
  • Entire software, ready to use (e.g. salesforce, office365)
• PaaS
  • Cloud provider provides the infrastructure, the operating system, middleware and runtime, on which one can directly build and deploy code and applications (e.g. Google app engine, force.com) 
• IaaS
  • cloud providers manage entire infrastructure (serves, operating systems), but no middleware, runtime, data and applications (e.g. AWS, Microsoft Azure)

Characteristics:

• Broad network access
  • capabilities are available and accessible through various client platforms (mobile, laptop etc)
• measured service
  • resources  monitored, controlled and reported
• on-demand self-service
  • capabilities provided automatically without human interaction
• rapid elasticity
  • resources easily  scaled up or down, accomodate peaks
• resource pooling
  • computing resources are shared and pooled to serve multiple customers, multi-tenant model