The unperceived boon and bane of Cloud Computing: End-user Computing vs. Integration

Cloud Computing is predicted to bring the next revolution in IT. Easy availability and the intuitive usability enable IT-professionals but also less IT-skilled people deploying IT-services. This encourages End-user Computing, where the end-user is able to solve business issues by designing the service as needed. But with end-users establishing such services, problems of integration occur due lack of IT-knowledge and insufficient skills of conceptual IT-development. By conducting a case study following the design science approach, we pointed out that with establishing cloud services the degree of End-user Computing is increased and moreover influenced by the services applied. Furthermore, we constrained that the independency from an IT-department ends up with the integration of end-user designed services in the existing IT-infrastructure. In order to solve this issue, we manually integrated IT-systems by the use of the Enterprise Application Integration approach.