INVESTIGATING THE IMPACT OF CLOUD ADOPTION IN FIRMS Dr Niamh O Riordan  BIS, National University of Ireland Galway  niamh.oriordan@nuigalway.ie Motivation Cloud computing combines elements of grid computing, utility computing and autonomic computing in an innovative deployment architecture (Zissis & Lekkas, 2012), More specifically, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) define it in terms of five characteristics (on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service), four deployment models (private, community, public and hybrid clouds), and three service models (Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service) (cf. Mell & Grance, 2011). The potential impact of cloud computing has sparked significant interest in the IS and IT industry. Cloud computing services, which are effectively based on a pay-as-you-go model (Armbrust et al., 2010), result in immediate savings on hardware and software (Morgan and Conboy, 2013) and can also lead to time savings by supporting process transparency and auditability and also by facilitating better communication within the firm and (Conboy & Morgan, 2012). However, empirical research on cloud computing is limited, focusing on the technical rather than business aspects (Leimeister et al., 2010) and on the barriers to adoption rather than the value implications of use (Conboy and Morgan, 2012; Clohessy & Acton, 2013). In particular, very little is known about the implications of cloud solutions on the use of time in firms – even though time use is recognised as a fundamental business performance indicator (Ciborra, 1999). This study therefore systematically investigates the business implications of the cloud adoption within the client firm using a temporal perspective. Literature Review Increased responsiveness at shorter notice: Cloud solutions affect firm agility (the capacity of firms to make significant changes at short notice in response to environmental changes). For the first time, firms can avail of dev/test environments on demand which can facilitate exploratory and innovative work within the firm. At the same time, cloud solutions are easy to install (Conboy & Morgan, 2012) and highly scalable (Armbrust et al., 2010) which increases firms’ capacity to rapidly respond to change by varying their own demand for particular services ( ibid. ). In addition, cloud solutions can