Service Digitization – Review of the Literature and Research Agenda

Abstract

Business digitization has received increased interest in recent years. Companies in a wide range of industries redesign business activities and even entire business models to create value with and appropriate value from digital resources and investments in information technology (IT). For services in particular, digitization has been emphasized as a promising strategy to improve performance and increase revenue streams. It is thus not surprising that many of the highly digitized industries include knowledge-intensive service sectors. Service digitization has received considerable attention in the academic literature. A substantial and rapidly growing body of work has focused on such concepts as “electronic (e)-service”, “IT-related service”, or “digital service”. However, the complexity and multi-facetted nature of service digitization, the different theoretical lenses taken, and the various contexts, in which it has been studied, have produced a rather fragmented research landscape. Until today, little efforts have been dedicated to examining the whole body of work and to delineating how research has developed and shaped knowledge on service digitization.Our article seeks to address this issue by looking at the extant body of work in a meta-review.