Design thinking: An exploration of mobile shopping for cloud services

Finding the best cloud service and cloud service provider that meet technical and business requirements of a particular organization is a well-known challenge. The decision making process is quite complex and includes understanding of the requirements, discovery of available cloud services, comparison of services available, and contract negotiation. With IT buying patterns changing, CIO and IT organizations are no longer the sole decision makers. The trend of Line-Of-Business owners shopping for Cloud Services is growing. In large organizations, the process requires collaboration between multiple stakeholders - business owners, enterprise architects, and procurement, which presents the additional challenge of finding effective communication and coordination mechanisms understood by a diversity of users. By applying design thinking principals, this paper examines a human aspect of the decision making process when shopping for cloud services. Our informal research into the application of design thinking focused on the design of a mobile application that eases the process of Cloud Service Shopping, ultimately resulting in design concepts for enhanced collaborative search and comparison capabilities.