Having the Mind in the Cloud: Organizational Mindfulness and the Successful Use of Desktop as a Service

Increasingly, public organizations require higher levels of reliability and flexibility from information systems (IS) while trying to reduce costs at the same time. Cloud computing is a promising technology to fulfill these requirements. In particular, Desktop as a Service (DaaS), as one facet thereof, offers reliability and flexibility by means of consistent anytime anywhere access to applications and data. Being interested in success characteristics and benefits of DaaS use in governmental agencies, we applied organizational mindfulness (OM) as theoretical lens in our study. By mindfully using reliable IS, such as DaaS, significant negative consequences of errors in governmental agencies can be mitigated. Thus, informed by DeLone and McLean´s IS Success Model we conducted a questionnaire-based study in a German State Ministry of Justice to analyze the differences between rather mindful and less mindful DaaS users and the resulting impact on task-related net benefits.