| With the rapid development of network and knowledge economy, firms need to quickly respond to market changes and take innovative actions to survive and develop under fierce competitions.Therefore, agilities of a firm directly determine its survival, and become development direction in the future. However, the traditional IT architecture impeds a firm’s agility to realize the value of IT to some degree because of high informationization cost and fixed technology infrastructures.Cloud computing represents the latest progress in information technology evolution and refers to an "IT service model where computing services (both hardware and software) are delivered on demand to customers over a network in a self-service mode, independent of device and location". Compared with traditional IT, cloud computing has some special features such as elasticity, scalability, resource sharing, pay per use and shared environment, which provides a more economical, flexible and controllable future IT solutions for firms to deal with complex and dynamic environment and then creats values. Chinese firms and government have also started to explore new informatization model based on cloud computing, make effort to increase competitive advantages and create new values.The huge potential of cloud computing has raised attentions of researchers. However, although existing literatures explore values of cloud computing from different angles, with most of them are just qualitative reasoning and judgement. Pior researches with clear research methods, explicit theoretical perspectives, and supported empirical data are few Specifically, the existing researches have three deficiencies:(1) Unclear concept and characteristics of cloud computing (2) Lack of empirical studies of value creation of cloud computing;(3) T lack of a clear, unified theoretical basis in the existing studies about value creation of cloud computing, with domestic research still a blank.Under the above background, this research startd from technical characteristics of cloud computing, then focuses on "how cloud computing creates values", and complies with the IT value creation research paradigm. This study gradually in-depth explores four research questions. First of all, based on the perspective of capability, this research parses and demonstrates the relationship of cloud infrastructure capability, organizational agility (operational agility, partnering agility and customer agility) and firm performance, then, treat the firm users of chinese largest public cloud service as the research object through the reference and the fusion of IT capability and organizational capability, to explore:(1) What the conception and dimensions of cloud infrastructure capacity are?(2) How cloud computing creats values for firm?(3) What the differences of the value creation of cloud computing are in different stages of firm and martker turbulence? Secondly, the previous researches partly explains the value creation of cloud computing in firm level, However, cloud computing is a new technology, and hasn’t used popularly. Therefore, this research attemptes to use the method of economics counterfactual simulation experiment, to answer question (4) What the value of cloud computing technology for widespread use is in our country?All around these above issues, this article comprehensively utilizes theoretical research, empirical research, structural equation modeling, Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) modeling and other research methods. Specifically, the works of this research are mainly manifested in the following four aspects:(1) We combine the concept and connotation of cloud computing, from the perspective of organization using IT resources, propose the construct of "cloud infrastructure capability", and define its concept and dimensions.Through literature review, this study clarifes the concept, characteristics, classification of cloud computing, as well as service mode, based on the theory of IT infrastructure capability, combined with the technical features of elasticity, scalability, resource sharing, pay per use and shared environment, propose the construct of "cloud infrastructure capability, and divided it into two dimensions-CI flexibility and CI integration, abstract out the cloud computing capability characteristics in management.(2) We propose and empirically test the value creation mechanism of cloud infrastructure capability (first affect organizational agility, then affect firm performance).Complying with the IT value creation research paradigm, this study proposes the concept of value creation model "cloud infrastructure capability-organizational agility-performance" based on the organization hierarchy capability view. Then, partial least squares (PLS) structural equation is adopted with questionnaire survey sample data to empirically test of the conceptual model and assumptions. The results shows that the two dimensions of CI flexibility and CI integration of cloud infrastructure capability are positively associated with three dimensions of organizations agility named operational agility, partnering agility and customer agility. Organizational agility is positively associated with firm performance. Results indicate that the application of cloud computing can help enterprises improve use of internal and external resources to cope with changes and abilities of taking innovative actions, namely organizational agility, and firm performance.(3) We systematically study the firm’s internal and external context variables, enterprise life cycle and market turbulence, respectively moderating the relationship between the cloud infrastructure capability and organizational agility.We use the method of PLS multi-group analysis. Results shows that enterprise life cycle negatively moderates the relationship between CI flexibility and operational agility, and between CI integration and partnering agility. However, enterprise life cycle postively moderates the relationship between CI integration and operational agility, and between CI flexibility and partnering agility And the moderating effect of enterprise life cycle between CI integration and customer agility is not significant. Market turbulence postively moderates the relationship among CI flexibility and operational agility, partnering agility, and among CI integration, partnering agility, and customer agility. However, Market turbulence negatively moderates relationship between CI flexibility and partnering agility. And the moderating effect of market turbulence between CI integration and operational agility is not significant. The research results illustrate that value creation of cloud computing are different in firm’s different stages and under different market turbulence(4) We attempt to adopt the method of economics counterfactual simulation research, and to simulate out the social and economic value after the popularization application of the cloud computing.We attempt to adopt the method of economics counterfactual simulation research, by building the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model of the popular use of cloud computing on the economic system, then use literature and official statistics to calibrate the model. Finally, this study simulates and estimates the spread use of the cloud computing and proposes that it will promote China’s GDP increased by0.41%-0.78%, and employment growth by0.06%-0.11%, as well as create a number of new small and medium-sized enterprises above designated size? increases by1.43%～2.84%in the next five years. And by setting the different technical diffusion apeed? and subregional simulation, this study finds that the value of cloud computing to a certain extent depends on the technology diffusion speed and are more valuable for less developed areas in China. This research makes up the gap of domestic studies.In a word, this research treats the firm users of "aliyun" cloud as the research object to explore the value creation mechanism of cloud computing to firms. This research to some extent fills the current cloud computing research gap and provides scientific guidance for firm’s cloud computing practice. At the same time, because cloud computing technology has not been used popularly, this study also uses counterfactual economic simulation experiment method to refine and deepen the social and economic value of cloud computing. |
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