Records management in the cloud: From system design to resource ownership

New technology implementations impact organizational behavior and outcomes, sometimes in unintended ways. A combination of design decisions, altered affordances, and political struggles within a state cloud computing implementation reduced levels of service among records management professionals, in spite of their strongly expressed desire to manage records with excellence. Struggles to maintain ownership and control over organizational processes and resources illustrate the power dynamics that are affected by the design of a new system implementation. By designing the system with a single goal in mind (centralization to reduce costs), strategic management failed to consider otherwise predictable outcomes of reducing the resources controlled by a group with lesser power and increasing the resources controlled by an already dominant power within the institution. These findings provide valuable insights into the considerations which cloud computing designs should take into account. They also offer an understanding of changing educational requirements for records management workers to engage more effectively across occupations in technologically changing environments and the potential risks that cloud computing provide to productivity. The research was comprised of an extensive literature review, a grounded theory methodological approach, and rigorous data collection and synthesis via an empirical case study.