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Top1. Introduction
After Amazon launched the earliest cloud computing service in 2006, Google introduced the concept of “cloud computing” in that same year. Computing is defined as any computer-related activity involving processing or storage, and cloud refers to data stored through this activity online rather than on the hard disk of a computer (Ouanouki et al., 2014; Bordonaba-Juste et al., 2020). An overview of the scale of the global cloud computing market (including infrastructure as a service [IaaS], platform as a service [PaaS], and software as a service [SaaS]) revealed market value that surpassed US$371.4 billion in 2020, with the expectation that the amount will exceed $832.1 billion by 2025 (Cloud Computing Market, 2020).
One incentive for enterprises introducing cloud computing is that they want to attain the objective of saving other IT-related expenses and improve operational efficiency by relying on cloud computing (Xiao et al., 2020; Sathiyamoorthi et al., 2021). Enterprises should coordinate and communicate with their global counterparts, supply chain partners, and plants (Senyo et al., 2018). Delayed communication and unsuccessful coordination will influence the time of goods deployment in the market. Cloud services for business process management (BPM) and supply chain management (SCM) can reinforce communication and coordination of the global planning system (Giannakis et al., 2019).
Evaluating IT expenditures on future accounting performance is a critical issue in the previous studies (Sambamurthy et al., 2003). IT expenditures and surpluses are associated in many ways: Because IT expenditures are considerable, the profit decreases in the current investment period. However, research and development typically raises increases profit by developing high-margin products, which differs from the method of IT investments for reducing costs to improve corporate efficiency, and in turn increase profit (Melville et al. 2004). A company investing in IT may reduce overall costs through operations and market advantages, thus generating more profit (Henderson et al., 2010) and Tobin’s q (Kumar and Li, 2016). The following reasons show why financial performance is considered a metric for measuring whether information systems can substantially facilitate enterprise practices, namely quantization numbers can be measured objectively. Hence, financial performance can be mutually understood in terms of value and behavior for realizing cohesion to improve competitiveness. Cloud computing is an innovative technology, and further discussion is necessary to determine whether the use of indicators is suitable for measuring the efficiency of cloud computing to measure past IT output, especially the financial indicator.
A frequent criticism concerns accounting performance indicators reflecting only historical information, whereas IT is expected to contribute to future performance (Lim et al., 2011). Market performance indicators reflect a company’s expectations for future performance. Hence, they can be considered as tools for determining the tangible and intangible as well as current and future benefits of IT investments (Lim et al., 2011). In the efficiency market, a company’s market price may reflect the values of all the available information (Kothari, 2001). Said et al. (2003) aimed to determine the influence on corporate performance when including nonfinancial indicators in a work contract, finding that a company’s long-term ROA improves through the combination of financial and nonfinancial indicators. In addition, Weir et al. (2007) found an association between nonfinancial performance indicators and an innovation-oriented strategy, quality-oriented strategy, industrial regulation and company soundness, and other aspects. The measurement system proposed by Kaplan and Norton (1992) is in agreement with the standards; therefore, the balanced scorecard (BSC), when combined with financial and nonfinancial indicators as well as objective and subjective factors, is a suitable tool for measuring the output of information systems. The BSC includes four dimensions, namely finance, customers, the internal process, and learning and growth.