A critical success factors assessment instrument for cloud migration readiness status in Saudi Arabian universities

Abstract

Saudi universities have at their disposal a huge number of low cost IT resources to aid teaching, research and learning. The emergence of cloud computing delivers substantial benefits in the form of rich education content, increased efficiency and agility that can be used to transform higher education in Saudi universities. By migrating to cloud services, Saudi universities will be moving data and programs from local servers to the internet, thereby providing users with the ability to access and share information at any time from multiple devices. Also, procuring IT resources such as infrastructure, applications, and platforms via the Internet will be cost effective, easy and fast. This will promote innovation in universities, as the main barrier of cost will be removed. However, the migration to cloud-based IT resources is not yet widespread in Saudi universities due to several challenges including security, legal policies and IT personnel skills. Moreover, at present, there is a lack of research and guidance on the significance of the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) to improve the success of cloud migration projects in Saudi university. These CSFs were used to measure the readiness of Saudi universities in terms of their ability, perception and readiness in making their cloud migration more successful. This research proposes a framework of enablers to guide the Saudi Arabian universities to migrate to the cloud paradigm successfully.

In the presented research, a set of key CSFs was identified by synthesising factors from studies concerned with the migration of cloud for higher education in global context and factors identified from previous research investigating the successful implementation of Web Based Learning (WBL) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) on higher education in Saudi Arabia. Based on the literature review, the proposed Success Factor Cloud Migration (SFCM1) framework was then evaluated via expert reviews and a survey conducted by IT specialists working in Saudi universities. The initial CSFs in SFCM1 were updated based on the expert reviews and the results were analysed via the Thematic Analysis approach. Based on the findings at this stage, additional CSFs were added to the framework as suggested by the experts. Subsequently, in order to confirm the reviewed CSFs, additional investigation via a structured online questionnaire was conducted and the outcome was analysed via one-sample t-test with the data integrity analysed via Cronbach’s alpha. The outcome indicated that most CSFs were statistically significant, apart from, the Physical Location CSF.

Subsequently, based on the confirmed SFCM2 framework, a cloud migration readiness assessment instrument (CMRA) was developed using Goal Question Metrics (GQM) approach. The scoring scales of the CMRA instrument were adapted from the COBIT5 Process Assessment Model (PAM). The practicality of CMRA instrument was evaluated by three case studies conducted in Saudi universities. The instrument was used to assess the readiness status of the Saudi universities that already planned to migrate to the cloud. Afterwards, the usefulness and practicality of the CMRA were evaluated through an evaluation questionnaire and interviews with seniors working in IT deanships in Saudi universities.

The contributions of this research are first that it developed a SFCM2 framework within the context of Saudi Arabian universities. Secondly, the framework was extended to an instrument (CMRA) to measure the readiness status of a particular Saudi university.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Abdulrahman Ayad Alharthi: orcid.org/0000-0002-2160-9515

ORCID for Gary Wills: orcid.org/0000-0001-5771-4088

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