The survey questionnaire

In order to verify the findings of the interviews, a survey questionnaire was use. Survey based research can be used to characterize the knowledge, behaviours, and attitudes of a large group by studying of a subset of them (Kasunic 2005 p.1). For this reason, surveys are used extensively in software and systems engineering studies to provide insight into issues, assist with problem-solving, and support effective decision making (Kasunic 2005).

Survey questionnaires are an efficient, economical tool, and the data collected is easy to analyse. They also reduce bias because the filling in of a questionnaire is not affected by the personal characteristics or skills of the interviewer which can have an effect on other forms of face-to-face interaction (Holt 1997).

The main reason for implementing a survey questionnaire in this study was to provide further evidence about the data collected from the qualitative interviews (Stage 1) regarding the issues and challenges affecting the process of migrating to the cloud. Another reason for using a questionnaire was to avoid a bias that may occur in the selection of the informants (interviewees) in the first phase (Holt 1997). The suggestion made by Kasunic (2005) for the process of designing an effective survey was followed for conducting the survey questionnaire. Figure 22 shows the sequence of the process.

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4.6.1 Questionnaire Objectives

 To gather data on organisations interested in cloud computing

 Determine respondents’ views with regard to migrating to cloud computing  Identify the main factors deterring organisations from migrating

 Identify legal issues associated with migrating to the cloud

 Explore the challenges companies experienced after the adoption of cloud services

 Identify the main knowledge and skills needed to support cloud services.  Identify the overall impact of migration to the cloud

 Assess views on the quality of existing cloud related information

 Identify the most valuable sources of information for supporting decisions for cloud migration

 Investigate the views concerning the need for a cloud knowledge-base to overcome the lack of customers’ cloud-related information

4.6.2 Target audience

In research surveys, a ‘population’ refers to all the members of a specific group. A population can be defined in terms of demography, geography, occupation, time, or some combination of these factors. When identifying the population for a study, it then becomes the target audience for the research (Kasunic 2005).

A ‘sample’ is a subset of the population. In survey research, the sample is studied and the findings are generalised to the population. However, this is only possible when strict procedures are followed to ensure that the sample is representative of the population (Kasunic 2005).

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In this research, any individual who had been involved in a migration to cloud computing project, including staff of organisations planning to migrate or already migrated to the cloud, staff of cloud providers, and cloud researchers, can be a member of the population. The target population was professionals, at management, or systems engineering levels, who had been involved in cloud migration projects. Participants were from organisations of different sizes and from diverse industry sectors. They included IT managers, software engineers, systems analysts, and executive managers, in addition to cloud systems researchers.

4.6.3 Design sampling plan

Availability sampling, such that anyone from within the target audience could participate in the survey, was used in this research. There were two reasons for this. First, the population consisted of organisations that had migrated or were planning to migrate to the cloud in the UK, and there are no exact statistics concerning such companies. Second, the target audience is known to be difficult to reach; they are time constrained and not freely available to participate in unsolicited surveys for reasons of confidentiality.

4.6.4 Survey design

The questionnaire was divided into three main parts. The first part consisted of qualifying questions to ensure the participants were within the target audience and to provide demographic information that might be needed for the analysis. It also included questions related to cloud issues. The questions in the second part were about the impact of cloud computing. Part three dealt with the quality of the existing cloud related information and the need for a cloud knowledge-base.

The main findings identified in the interviews were incorporated into the questions. The majority of the questions were multiple choices that allowed participants to choose more than one category. The researcher attempted, as far as possible, to keep the question wordings simple and easy to understand to avoid ambiguity. Please refer to appendix D.1 which shows the questionnaire format.

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The survey was implemented using a web-based tool (Survey monkey), and included a questionnaire consisting of 15 questions. The questionnaire accompanied by a covering letter which explained the purpose of the research and guaranteed the confidentiality of the data gathered.

4.6.5 Pilot test questionnaire

The success of a questionnaire requires the questions to be simple, easy to understand, and easy to answer, based on printed instructions and definitions (Holt 1997). To ensure that the survey measured what it was intended, a pilot survey was conducted. The conditions for ensuring valid responses to survey questions described by Holt (1997) were taken into account during the pilot. According to the guidelines proposed by Holt (1997), the questions must be understandable, and that the respondent must be both capable of providing the information requested, and willing to do so.

Four participants were used for the pilot survey. The purpose of the pilot survey was to avoid confusions and/or misinterpretations of the questions. It also aimed to detect errors. In general the feedback from the pilot survey showed that the questions were understandable and the participants were able to provide the required answers. A few amendments were suggested, which involved rewording some of the questions. It was also recommended that there should be no more than five questions per page to avoid respondent fatigue, and that all matrix questions should be on a separate page. These recommendations were implemented before conducting the main survey.

4.6.6 The survey

Subjects of the study were contacted in various ways, but mainly by sending a link via e-mail. Other methods were also used, such as handing out printed questionnaires, usually at conferences and social media websites (Twitter and linked in). Zikmund (2000) suggested that the target population is the entire group of subjects of interest who are defined by the research objectives. However, there is usually a considerable difference between the population that a researcher is

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attempting to study and their availably for sampling (Zikmund 2000). In this study the researcher attempted, as far as possible, to find participants from the target audience by distributing the questionnaire using various methods.

The questionnaire was distributed between May and October 2014. The total distribution list consisted of approximately 1,100 users and 118 responses were received. Sixteen responses were incomplete, therefore they were eliminated from the analysis giving the total usable responses a 102 which is approximately ten per cent of the total population and consistent with what could be expected for a survey of this kind.

The questionnaire that was handed out has achieved the highest response rate while distribution using social media tools achieved the lowest. A large number of messages which were sent through social media, might be the reason for the low response rate. It was observed during the hand-to-hand distribution of the questionnaire that women spend more time than men reading the questions before providing their answers.

4.6.7 Survey analysis

Statistical analyses were applied to the survey results. Descriptive analyses were performed for each variable independently to summarise the data. These analyses were obtained from the tool used to conduct the survey (Survey Monkey), which provides automatic descriptive analysis. The whole data set was imported to Microsoft Excel. Pivot table tools were then used to analyse the data based on the demographic values (See appendix D.2).