Assessing the role of cloud computing in the strategic agility of banking

This manuscript assesses the role of a relatively new technology ‘cloud computing’ in achieving strategic agility within the UK banking sector. While there is research on how ‘cloud’ can enhance innovation capacity, there is little on the implications for strategic agility - an increasingly important topic in the IS/IT literature (Doz and Kosonen, 2010). Mell and Grance (2010) define cloud as: “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” Such new technologies have accelerated global competition per se and as a result organizations must be able to rapidly adapt their strategies as well as their operations; agility is ‘cascading’ up the organization from operations to C-Suite. Banking is no exception (Baskerville et al., 2005) and given the industry’s reputation for conservatism, we felt this was ripe for study since cloud and strategic agility are in tension with the industry’s usual pace of change. According to Lewis et al. (2014) organizational survival today very much depends on strategic agility, which in brief involves flexible and mindful responses to constantly changing environments. Our question is whether cloud enables or constrains such responses. According to Doz and Kosonen (2010) there are three dimensions to strategic agility: (i) Strategic sensitivity; (ii) Leadership unity; (iii) Resource fluidity. Can cloud deliver on all three dimensions for banking? We set out to explore these questions.