This paper presents a typology for modular service design. The authors review engineering, manufacturing, and service research literature and develop three key concepts for service modularization: service module, service architecture, and service experience. Thereafter these key concepts are further decomposed into detailed constructs. Basing on the reviewed literature, they develop a common typology for modular services. The authors argue that their typology provides a foundation for the development of modular service design methods. The authors also expect that it is important to recognize how customers perceive the service. They propose that service experiences can be characterized by value creation, role perception, personalization, and task complexity and by how the customers experience the particular services.

Servitization and productization lead to offerings and solutions that combine tangible products, standardized base services, and customized services. These tailored service offerings or solutions call for new modular service architectures and service process design approaches to complement traditional service and product design methods. In this paper we suggest a modular service architecture framework to develop tailored service solutions. We use the framework as a lens to analyze three Finnish small- and medium-sized enterprises in the retail industry offering an e-store to their customers. We identify and define the order-delivery process of the case e-stores' supply chain; the modularity and modularization principles of the order-delivery process; and constructs such as service process modularization, modular reuse, and modular variation as well as their interrelationships. For practitioners, we provide a real-life example of how modular service design can be adopted when developing new and modified service encounter processes in the context of the less studied, small e-stores' order-delivery process.

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This paper explores Extreme Programming (XP) as an information systems development approach and argues that it is mainly old wine in new bottles. We take an interpretive and critical view of the phenomenon. We made an empirical study of two companies that apply an XP style development approach throughout the information systems development lifecycle. The results of our research suggest that XP is a combination of best practices of traditional information systems development methods. It is hindered by its reliance on talented individuals, which makes its large scale deployment as a general purpose method difficult. We claim that XP can be useful for small teams of domain experts, who are physically close to and able to communicate well with the endusers and who are good designers and implementers. However, these skilled and motivated individuals with high working moral can exhibit high productivity regardless of the methods used, if they are not overly constrained by bureaucracy.

In recent years, multi-organizational collaboration has become more and more important in both business and research. We conducted an action research (AR) intervention with a consortium of Finnish universities that needed to revise its joint strategy. We designed and facilitated a repeatable collaboration process for this multi-organizational strategy development. The process was built using the Collaboration Engineering (CE) approach with thinkLets, which provides expert-level advice for novice facilitators, and it was powered by Group Support Systems (GSS). Our overall impression of CEÕs ability to provide valuable design and facilitation support for complex processes is very affirmative. The consortium was satisfied with the intervention, as it saved huge amounts of time compared with conventional strategic work. The process was also seen as more democratic, because the GSS tools enabled equal participation during the session. Our study also provides a ready-to-apply CE process recipe to organizations for revising their strategy. Through this recipe, supplemented with knowledge on thinkLets, the strategy development process may easily be repeated by other facilitators or even practitioners.