An Upper Ontology for Benefits Management of Cloud Computing

Benefits Management provides an established approach for decision making and value extraction for IT/IS investments and, can be used to examine cloud computing investments. The motivation for developing an upper ontology for Benefits Management is that the current Benefits Management approaches do not provide a framework for capturing and representing semantic information. There is also a need to capture benefits for cloud computing developments to provide existing and future users of cloud computing with better investment information for decision making. This paper describes the development of an upper ontology to capture greater levels of knowledge from stakeholders and IS professionals in cloud computing procurement and implementation. Complex relationships are established between cloud computing enablers, enabling changes, business changes, benefits and investment objectives Keywords—Ontology Generation; Benefits Management; Cloud Computing