Muhammad Nabil Ezra | 29118095

Decision Making and Negotiation

The City of Pittsburgh goes to the cloud:

a case study of cloud solution strategic selection and deployment

1. Why was it important to assess the strategic position of CIS in relation to the City strategy
prior to proposing a solution for the provision of email services for the City?

As the technical branch of the City of Pittsburgh, the City Information System (CIS), which
function as the City’s IT department, is responsible for providing computing service to
approximately 3000 City employees and for this purpose relies on centralized IT shop, 55 full-
time IT employees, a $5.6 million operating budget and $500.000 capital badget. In terms of
server insfrastructure, CIS employs Vmware, Cisco network core/edge, Microsoft Windows OS
(Server/Client), and Linux-based servers. The problem CIS is facing is the increasing demand of
City employees for mail. To recommend a new email solutions, CIS required to minimize costs
while keeping the same quality of email services, the ability to scale services up as needed.
It is important to understand the nature of the city administration and its technology
department. CIS is resposible for the planning, acquisition, installation, and support of the City’s
proprietary and open computing environments. This include support of personal and mobile
computers and the development of specialized software programs for public Safety and Finance
departments and for other departments initiatives.

2. Why is it important to involve stakeholders (internal and external) in the decision-making

process as early as possible?

Because based on their previous projects, the CIO knew that the importance of stakeholder buy-
in has been tradionally recognized as important in public administration and that the City had
direct experience with what could happen when stakeholders felt they had not participated in
the decision-making process. A project to create a wireless downtown in the City a few years
later, for example, had faced numerous difficulties and resistance by unconvinced potential
users. it was decide that stakeholder participation was needed from the start. The most critical
activity that would require stakeholder participation would be the selection of the proper cloud
service provider for the City. Particular attention to the participation of CIS stakeholders in the
Cloud decision-making process is needed.

3. Why was so much time devoted to the development of a sound decision-making process? Is
this equally important in both the private and public sectors? What are the differences
between public and private administration and the deployment of IT innovations?

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 According to the case, in order to make a decision, the stakeholders should involve in decision-
making process. This process turned out to be more time consuming and laborious expected.
Each committee member shared his or her own perspective on the project, accomodating each
commitee member’s interest was difficult at best.
 Public administration: refers to orderly managing the resources, to achieve the purpose
established by the goverments.
 Private administration: the operation, management and organization of the affairs of
the business enterprise.
 Deployment of IT innovations: There are different types of cloud deployment of IT
innovation services available.
o Public cloud: The customer shares the cloud services with other customers. This
is the option with the lowest cost because the customer does not have any
ownership of any of the cloud infrastructure.
o Private cloud: private cloud is owned and operated by the company, which then
shares services with different departments in the organization.
o A hybrid cloud: combination of the previous options where the customer owns
part of the hardware for some applications and deploys the rest within the
public cloud
The deployment needs of the City of Pittsburgh were rather particular, although common to
goverment agencies. Due to the aonfidental nature of the information it handled and the
potential for liability should this information be stored or disseminated outside US soil the City
of Pittsburgh would require a goverment cloud. In this type of public cloud deployment, the
provider would guarantee that the data could storage would always take place within US
territory.

4. The decision-makers quickly assessed, in this case and based on previous experiences, the
readiness of email services to be migrated to the cloud. Can you think of other IT services that
could be easily migrated to the cloud? Why?

Some others IT services that could be mitigated to the cloud:

 Storage: The data is remotely maintained, managed, and backed up. Businesses and
organizations can often reduce annual operating costs by using storage. This can be used
as a back-up plan by businessess by providing a second copy of important files that can
be stored at remote location and can be accessed through internet connection.
 Cloud computing: It can be describe as the style of computing in which dynamically
scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the internet.
Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology
infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them, data and applications are available to
employees.

5. The case ends with the Mayor of the City of Pittsburgh announcing the completion of the
project on time and on budget. What factor(s) contributed to making this cloud migration
project a success? What constitutes IT success in the end?

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 Factors that contributed to making this cloud migration and project timeline success are
selection committee according to the plan and analytic hierarchy process that the essence of
the AHP is the subvision of complex decision-making problem or planning issue into its
components or levels, and arranging these levels into an ascending hierarchic order. At each
level of hierarchy, the components are compared relative to each other by using a pairwise
comparison scheme. The components of a given level are related to an adjacent upper level
and theraby generate integration across the levels of hierarchy. The results of this systematic
process are a set of priorities of relative importance or method of scalling between the various
actions or alternatives. The relative priority weights can provide guidlines for the allocation of
resources among the entities at the lower level.

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