How did managers in manufacturing firms see the organisational role of cloud computing before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic? Drawing on three independent surveys of manufacturing enterprises conducted in 2019, 2020 and 2022, this book documents a selective and asymmetric shift in how that role was perceived. Between the pre-pandemic and pandemic waves, the view of cloud as a source of knowledge and manufacturing capability rose significantly, while its role as infrastructure modernisation did not share in the rise, a pattern that a uniform story of accelerated adoption does not readily accommodate. To account for it, the book proposes the Pandemic Transformation Model, drawing on the Knowledge-Based View and dynamic capability theory.
The book introduces Cloud-Enabled Digital Capability, an exploratory composite construct that reveals a governance gap: after the pandemic, cloud adopters lead non-adopters in every capability domain, yet their governance and cybersecurity remain well behind their technology and human capital. Methodologically, it offers a fuzzy harmonisation framework for comparing survey waves whose instruments changed over time, and triangulates its findings through exploratory factor analysis, bootstrap inference, fuzzy association rules, hierarchical clustering and weighted regression. Throughout, it separates what the data show from what is theoretically proposed, making it a worked example of careful inference from repeated cross-sectional data.
The book will be of interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in information systems, innovation and technology management, operations and manufacturing management, and research methods, as well as to CIOs, digital transformation leaders and policy-makers concerned with the digitalisation of manufacturing.