Family code 3: Technology

The technology context entails establishing and exploring causal relationships between and amongst technological compatibility, geo-restriction, relative advantage, and trialability and uncertainty factors. Figure 5.3 illustrates the established interrelationships.

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First to emerge is that geo-restriction can bring about uncertainty. Participant 1 pointed out to this by saying;

“As a result we got this kind of impendence mismatch between stockholders that still very tied to physical infrastructure basically treating the cloud as second classes something not to be trusted or something less secure than physical systems.

One of the things of vital importance is decent code of afterwards ...so being able to up the level of communication from email, instant messaging, to voice call and video conference. It is vital in terms of navigating those challenges and communication and challenges to collaboration when working in an agile way” (P1)

As discussed in chapter two section 2.6, physical infrastructure mismatches may drive clients to uncertainty. Participant 4 asserts that some developers feel that data is safer within their building than stored in data centres away from the premises. Emphasising this participant said; “Existing developers don’t want to learn how to use the cloud and there is this weird idea that data in your building is safer than data on a cloud server.

The important point is that the only thing that “cloud” means is that you don’t really know where your physical server is located. Using the cloud is an economical decision, not a technical one” (P4)

In support of Participant 4’s observation above, Participant 3 also argued that data centres located in distant locations may bring about uncertainties in the provision of services such as hosting as a result of latency. Participant 3 argued that;

“The data centers are based in Western Europe in Ireland both Amazon and Microsoft and am not sure of Google and there’s latency. If you hosting a Website or Application or API over there, there is a slight bit of latency. This is the most important thing for me to know and for most applications it’s not disruptive.

As People Orientated, communication is key to making it work. First the problem for me is not where the infrastructure is hosted, it is not related to where your infrastructure is hosted” (P3)

The challenges associated with location of data centres and how that results in uncertainty on the way organisations perceive and work with cloud computing services were further elaborated on by Participants 2 and 5.

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Emphasising the importance of having local data centres or centres that are within reach geographically Participant 2 said that;

“It’s quite a challenge I have been basically depending on infrastructure and resources provided by somebody else and that is always a challenge.

If you look at guys like Facebook, Google and Amazon these companies have data centers almost everywhere. They are able to fall back if you acquire data services from them they are able to fall back on another data center if the main one experiences problems” (P2)

In re-highlighting the same observation Participant 5 went on to claim that;

“It’s better to have a localized server plant process the data and once the data is been processed then push it up to the Cloud then access it from the Cloud” (P5)

The interrelationship between geo restriction and uncertainty came out strongly in this study, and will be discussed further in chapter six.

Another interesting link established during data analysis (axial and selective coding) is that between trialability and uncertainty. As pointed out by Participants 1 and 3 trialability can be caused by uncertainty. This interrelationship has also been confirmed by Pennings (2015). Commenting on the relationship between trialability and uncertainty participants 1 said;

“At the moment what they are doing is somebody has to buy these things and try to compare offerings across of Cloud Providers. Trial ability straight!!!

There’s still aspects of that I think we still kind of negotiating. We could turn the corner in a perspective that we could demonstrate that the Cloud is viable, that is financially of interest to the organization because it would end up investing large amounts of Capex into servers” (P1)

Still elaborating on the interrelationship between uncertainty and trialability the same participant (P1) went on to point out that;

“When we start talking the impact of Lean Software Development and if you wanted to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), you were not sure of what impact it would have in the market place and what potential it would attract…..so you just have to try it” (P1)

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Also important to note is uncertainty was observed to have a relationship with other factors besides trialability. These factors include, as already illustrated in figure 5.6, geo-restriction, compatibility, and relative advantage. Confirming the interrelationships around compatibility Participant 3 mentioned that;

“Am glad you said that everyone uses it to their purpose and the extreme case e.g. Western Digital have their personal cloud that’s basically a portable hard drive that does not make a definition there” (P3).

Referring to issues of compatibility Participant 5 argued that;

“We treat Cloud technology as localized technology, the only difference is that we can access them either in the office on the customer side, we do not really treat them as different technology to our development tech” (P5).

Whilst on the other hand Participant 6 also commented on the issues of compatibility by saying; “That inter-operability does not exist. It reminds me of when networking was starting. Apple had its own network, Microsoft and Novell. Those proprietor sort of systems and you were forced to use their Vendor Specific Applications, Hardware etc. It reminds of the same type of thinking that has been implemented. We could call it Cloud Technology just another form of Private network. We are back at that day again.

My questions would be how you planning to implement this cause they are a lot of considerations such as provision of tools. Practicality of small business may not work very well” (P6)

In sync with Participant 1 and 6 above and making a point on the importance of compatibility in the technology context, Participant 7 highlighted that;

“It’s mostly a question of adaptability, adapting to the current standards of design and development…and this affect how we choose to adopt new technologies” (P7)

On the relative advantage factor of technology relating to cloud computing Participant 1 had this to say;

“One of the biggest problems you face in trying to deliver software in short increments is that you typically run into environments where you have to collaborate with 3rd parties to deploy software. E.g. back in early 2000 my wife was working with Mosque Ceiling. They had a 3rd party responsible for their hosting and as a result they had to

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submit a change request like a month in advance in order to get a code deployed. The time period has shrunk dramatically because of the Cloud technology

Being able to spin up an instance with your latest future branch and being able to test it and then tearing the server down is all made possible through the Cloud Technology, as before it would be sharing resources and have to schedule and inform colleagues am going to put my branch this afternoon no one touch the server. “

Your ability to scale the application in cloud technology means you do not have to invest in over architecting systems to make sure you have enough physical servers hooked up” (P1)

What this implies is that by using agile development methodologies in adoption and use of cloud computing environments organisations will save on investment as they do not need the additional overheads associated with heavy solution of design tasking.

Elaborating on how the above observation helps to reduce investment costs Participant 1 went on to state that;

“And increasingly we paying a lot of attention to DevOps areas where we are starting to make use of tool chains like Ansible for configuration management that are able to set up development environments quicker and be able to run in the Virtual machines within Developers laptops.

What used to happen in the past was systems administrators working on hardware boxes and really keeps the lights on, manage hardware/networks, rack and stack, install/manage software on servers and/or clients, etc.” (P1).

DevOps offers a philosophy that a tool chain enables dealing with large scale Cloud based infrastructure in a very cost effective and very risk-averse approach.

With direct reference to the relative advantage of development operations such as agile development Participant 5 stated that;

“I think on Agile Development in terms of Management point of view it has added more benefits, it’s easier for Management to access their reports from their Tablets and Mobile phones cause they do not have to be at a specific location” (P5)

And what the observations and views of the eight interviewed participants does bring out is the different causal interrelationships between and amongst the context of environment, organisation and technology and how these interrelationships influence the manner in which

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organisations perceive, decide to adopt and use new technologies e.g. in the case of this study agile development methodologies and cloud computing.

It was based on this deeper understanding that the researcher was able to move a step towards the development of propositions whose objective, as outlined in chapter one, is to support SMMEs using agile development methodologies to adopt cloud computing services.

5.10 Conclusion

As overviewed in its introduction chapter five presented the data that was generated through the case study and interviewing processes. The chapter started by orienting the reader to the data analysis framework that was used. The chapter then outlined the data management process, detailing what it is and how it was done. In line with its objective, as overviewed in the introduction chapter five then provided a thick description of the data analysis, starting with open coding up until the last stage of selective coding. Each coding stage was defined and explained. From selective coding the chapter presented and discussed in brief the three emerging family categories (codes) around which the development of the anticipated theoretical framework and associated propositions are going to be oriented.

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