13th European Conference on eGovernment – ECEG 2013 1 | Page 562

Cloud with standards and guidelines: SRs form a consortium that defines standards, guidelines and requirements for the community cloud. Providers must comply with the guidelines. Regulation by awarding lots. Regulation must be clear and easy to implement for commerce. Congruent products are offered due to clear norms and standards. Standard‐based cloud: Authorities define standards. Providers are entitled, if they comply with standards, to play a part and sell services. Analogy with grid computing. Non‐community cloud: Cloud for authorities offered by individual providers. If cloud is used, provider must be preferred.

Konrad Walser and Olivier Brian

Minimal regulation: Higher position prescribes minimal regulation standards that must be followed. May include selection procedure or categorisation of data. Each SR decides within minimal regulations how and where it deploys the cloud. Shared service centre: SR simultaneously acts as SP in the market or organisation. Shared services offered obtainable by several SRs. Core competence of the organisational unit can be made available to others.

Simple selection of SP by certificates or labels. Potential for computing power in the community. Open structure enables participation of many providers. No dependence on one provider. Defined contact person available for all issues. Contact person available in event of problems. Changes do not have to be made via the community. Central competencies: know‐how can be gathered with provider. Internal process providers can be quickly and efficiently compiled.

Fast adaptation of offerings to market. Slight restriction in autonomy of SR. Clear principles and guidelines.

Organisational units concentrate on core competencies. Clear responsibility of the SP. Direct billing for services between organisational units. Existing competencies are retained.

Communication and co‐ordination occur redundantly via relevant SP. Standards for SP complicated to define and can only be monitored with great effort.

No actual organisational form possible. Rather anarchistic organisation. Time‐consuming to ensure traceability.

Monopoly; substitute offering not possible. Pricing, innovation and market regulation completely in power of providers. Pooling effects; only limited exploitation of characteristic pooling effect. Too‐big‐to‐fail problem: provider must be carried by the authority. Bankruptcy / failure to provide service with major consequences for authorities not acceptable. Vendor‐lock‐in: high dependency of providers. Deployed technology can be determined by provider. Change to another provider complicated and requires major effort. Few synergy uses in cloud. Selection procedure and market analyses performed by all SRs themselves / redundantly. SR critical mass not achieved, act as small buyers in market.

Role separation between SP and SR in the organisational unit. Role conflict within the organisational unit. Difficult to ensure an overview of offerings across different organisational units.

The different approaches shown in table 4 are assessed in view of their usability in public administration in the following chapter.

3. Cloud computing in Swiss public administration

As part of qualitative research, the sourcing approaches of four Swiss cantons of different sizes and two Swiss cities( one large and one medium sized), were examined. It turned out that none of the cantons and neither of the cities use or have a community cloud. However, the degree of virtualization( private cloud) with differences is quite high, and tends to increase with the size of the IT department and the degree of virtualization. The majority of the cantons and cities which were investigated do not develop services themselves, assigning development to external companies. Most of the cantons and cities operate IT themselves. In one case, every request for a new service or application is checked, to ascertain whether it can be assigned externally or internally regarding development or operation. The construction or consolidation of their own data centers seems to be an issue. In one case, an external data center has been rented. In another case, one public administration rented out its own data center infrastructure for financial services. In a broader sense, the maturity of ICT ser‐

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