Study On Migrating Enterprise Information Systems To Cloud

Cloud Computing integrates the information technology resources including software,data and hardware on the cloud platform instead of being deployed local originally.Self-service,dynamic configuration,convenient access,measurable service and pay-per-use make cloud computing popular.It is the trend for the on premise enterprise information systems(EIS)migrating to cloud to be software as a service(SaaS).However,during such transformation,are the traditional process and methods to develop EIS still suitable or enough to guide the development practices on the cloud?If not,what changes happen or what supplements are needed?And what are they?To answer these questions,the characteristics of SaaS are abstracted and the state-of-art of SaaS research is analyzed,the main conclusions and research contributions are shown as follows:(1)The process model of migrating EIS to cloud is brought forward.Based on the prototype of software development life cycle(SDLC),and compared with the process of information technology(IT)innovation and the process of IT outsourcing,a five-phase process model of migrating EIS to cloud is put forward,including planning,selecting,migrating,relationship governing and refreshing.The participants,detailed tasks,success factors and delivery work in each phase are defined and clarified,as well as the critical problems therein.(2)The requirements are acquired from the analysis on EIS usage.In the traditional planning phase,analysts always conduct fact finding by interviewing users to get self-report data to analyze existing system,understand the problem and propose the goals.Besides the traditional way,the investigation into the real usage of existing EIS from the objective user behavior data is a complementation.The requirements acquisition framework is put forward according to the combination of information systems usage theory and human behavior dynamics theory.By the method of bipartite network and on the different levels of system(system-subsystem-modular-function)and users(individual-role-total),the objective facts and rules can be derived from the analysis on how users use the system and how the system is used by users,all of which provide the foundations for defining the problems or requirements from the organization or businesses or EIS or users.(3)The decision on moving which EISs to cloud is conducted by introducing the prospect theory.In the planning phase,it is also needed for decision makers to decide which EIS should migrate to cloud with priority.During the decision-making,the decision makers always have the perception or psychology of status quo bias or pursuing management fashion to copy benchmarking of IT fashion,which always happen when making the traditional information system adoption decision.Considering these psychology mechanism,the prospect theory is introduced to develop a method of deciding on the readiness of EIS to cloud with the indicators based on transaction cost theory and Technology-Organization-Environment(TOE)framework.The decision method is validated by empirical analysis on 6 sampling enterprises from different types,and also by the comparison with the grey random multi-criteria decision method based on expected value.The proposed method can help decision makers to select the EIS to move to cloud with priority on the level of system.(4)Migrating enterprise resources planning(ERP)to cloud step-by-step is decided by the perspective of information intensity.If the selected system is ERP,which is highly integrated and highly complex,how to migrate?So it is still needed to adopting the step-by-step migration strategy to mitigate risks.After analyzing the devlopment and application of information intensity concept,it is true that information intensity has the decision role in adopting cloud innovations.Based on the modularized structure foundation got in ERP design and development,the usage behavior of ERP users can be observed in the different structure level of module or even function.According to the logic of using information systems equalling to the information processing activity,information intensity is measured and calculated objectively,and then highlight the business areas with different information processing requirements and information processing capability,and the corresponding function or module have high probability to be selected to move to cloud.The method is validated by the real ERP usage behavior data from a manufacturing enterprise of CX.