Name : Billy Gema Mahaputra

NIM : 29118082
Class : YP59C

1. Why was it important to assess the strategic position of City Information System (CIS)
in relation to the City strategy prior to proposing a solution for the provision of email
services for the City?
2. Why is it important to involve stakeholders (internal and external) in the decision-
making process as early as possible?
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
difference between public and private administration and the deployment of IT
innovations?
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?
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?
ANSWER

1. As the technical branch of the City of Pittsburgh, the CIS, which functions as the City’s
IT department, is responsible for the planning, acquisition, installation and support of
the city’s proprietary and open computing environments. This includes support of
personal and mobile computers and the development of specialized software programs
for it’s Public Safety and Finance departments and for other departmental initiatives.
However, many of the employees that supported by CIS having little or no contact with
technology while at work. It’s lack of exposure to technology, coupled with the City’s
inability to understand it’s IT alignment that created an organizational culture of
onsolescence and inefficiency.
As can bee seen, the analysis of the internal variables showed that CIS faced serious
limitations of finacial and technical resources. This suggested that hiring additional
personnel to cope with the growing need of email services would be very difficult.
Assessing the specific personnel, hardware and software requirements was not easy
since the demand for services was hard to predict accurately, even as it was gowing
continously. On top of this, CIS had traditionally had a hard time retaining highly
qualified technical employees who were soon tempted with high salaries by private
firms in the City. At external level, the City was being pushed toward higher integration
with other government agencies, such as that Allegheny County, to optimize service
and be cost effective.
To recommend a new email solution, the City’s CIO understood that he was required
to minimize costs while keeping the same quality of email services, the ability to scale
services up as needed and an openness to future IT initiatives. His analysis strongly
suggested that going to teh cloud to contratct email as SaaS was also ideal for the City
of Pittsburgh to fulfill the needs for innovation and efficiency while keeping costs under
control.
2. The CIO knew that the importance of stakeholder buy-in has been traditionally
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. At the internal stakeholders, the CIO realized that his own technology
employees would be skeptical of going into the cloud and would be biased against the
quality of cloud services once contracted. It thus became clear that the critical success
factor for cloud services would be a complete buy-in from the employees at the CIS
and City level.
It was decided that stakeholder participation was neede 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 was needed.\

3. The City of Pittsburgh had experience with previous projects and understood that an
element critical to the success of a project was setting up a proper decision-making
team. In terms of team composition, it was decided that group members would be
selected not in terms of position, but rather expertise. Given the need to optimize the
time dedicated to discussions, a structured approach toward team communications was
adopted. For this purpose, it was decided that a facilitator with experience in leading
decision-making groups would be appointed. The facilitator would instruct the
committee members to indicate what they had like or not liked about the specific
proposal on the table and once each member had done so, a second chance would be
given to add a comment.
In a 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. A private cloud is owned and operated by the company,
which then shares services with different departments in the organization. A hybrid
cloud is a combination of the previous options where the customer owns part of the
hardware for some applications and deploys the rest within the public clous. The
deployment needs of the City of Pittsburgh were rather particular, although common to
government agencies. Due to the confidential 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 government cloud.

4. Here are other IT services that could be easily migrated to the cloud :
 Contact management functionality, current contact information transfer and
management and applications for desktops and mobile device.
 Basic calendar functionality and management
 Archive and backup; ability to store and retrieve live data for a minimum of 180
days, adhere city policy or legal requirements
 E-Discovery; ability to search, retrieve, store, identify and report information
 Collaboration files; ability to share, store and access files throughout the
solution while providing a process flow feature for the users

5. There are several factors and steps that contributed to making this cloud migration
project a success with utilizing AHP decision-making methodology. The first step in
AHP approach consist of modelling the decision as a hierarchy. The hierarchy starts at
the top with a goal and is followed by decision criteria in the subsequent lower level.
Under each criterion, a third level of sub-criteria can be added. The bottom and last
level of the hierarchy is constituted by the alternatives to be evaluated. These factores
that determine decision- making are :
 Vendor qualifications
 End-user usability
 Technical requirements
 Financial
 Opportunities

In the second step, prioritizing or weighting the criteria, all the criteria are compared
pairwise with respect to the goal at hand. This is important because rarely the different
criteria/sub-criteria will have the same priority for the decision-making. The intensity
of these judgments is represented by a value in Saaty’s (1982) numerical scale, which
ranges from 1 – equally important to 9 – extremely important in criteria of comparison
matrix.

The third step consists of evaluating the alternatives with respect to each criterion/sub-
criterion. In this step, the decision-maker has two possinle lines of action. Similar to the
previous step, one can compare the alternatives in a pairwise fashion with respect to
each criterion/sub-criterion, build an alternative comparison matrix with respect to each
criterion/sub-criterion and obtain the final priorities constitutes the fourth step in the
AHP approach and is called synthesis of the model.

The final step, sensitivity analysis, consists of varying the weights of each of the criteria
to determine how the preferences might change if the importance of selected criteria
were to change. Doing this provides considerable reassurance that outcome is stable to
variations in judgments. The cloud vendor evaluation committee conducted the
sensitivity analysis at a later stage once other stake other stakeholders had a chance to
analyze the model and discuss the results.