To Cloud or not to Cloud. Strategic choices and IT governance in the digital transformation of a University

One late evening on 21st March 2015, Francesca – Head of Research and Teaching office at The University – ran the meeting and was hoping that the information and insights collected enabled her to make the right decision. She initiated the meeting by telling the story that few days ago on 15th March, during the presentation of a new digital solution for universities by MG company, she realized how different can be the instructors’ practices in managing teaching materials and interacting with students. She gave examples of tools and functions used by University instructors such as personal webpages, blogs, Moodle, Dropbox, Google Drive, iTunes, WordPress, Facebook groups, Blackboard, etc. Francesca knew how important innovation is in a competitive higher education market. Therefore, Francesca has always been supportive on teaching experiments made by instructors. For instance, in 2007, she encouraged the Information Systems (IS) research group at University in adopting Moodle as a Learning Management System (LMS) for their IS courses. In 2014, the positive feedback collected from both students and instructors who used Moodle, led Francesca to pilot the system at University level. Simone, a member of the IS group, was in charge of the implementation and received full support from the IT Office. After one year, the new learning platform was available for any instructor interested in experimenting the Moodle functionalities. However, during the last exam session, the learning platform was down for few hours. Not only students were unable to access the teaching materials to prepare for the exams, but also professors were unable to assess students works! “Why not having one platform to support all our teaching practices? One channel to interact with our students” she said. She asked for inputs and insights from a team of experts before making a decision. Francesca’s idea was to have a single Learning Management System (LMS) supporting more than 60 programs in the four University departments. Now the problem was to select a proper technological solution, fitting with the needs of both students and instructors, and also reducing the risk of downtime. Especially knowing that many instructors will not be happy to standardize their practices, she wondered how to convince them to use the new system.