Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS)
AMCIS 2009 Proceedings
Association for Information Systems Year 2009
New Service Development for Electronic
Services – A Literature Review
Christoph Riedl∗ Jan Marco Leimeister†
Helmut Krcmar‡
∗Technische Universitat Munchen, riedlc@in.tum.de
†Universitat Kassel, leimeister@uni-kassel.de
‡Technische Universita¨t Mu¨nchen,, krcmar@in.tum.de
This paper is posted at AIS Electronic Library (AISeL).
http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2009/606

Riedl et al. New Service Development for E-Services Review

Proceedings of the Fifteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, San Francisco, California August 6
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2009 1
New Service Development for Electronic Services – A
Literature Review
Christoph Riedl
Technische Universität München, Boltzmannstr. 3,
85748 Garching b. München, Germany
riedlc@in.tum.de
Jan Marco Leimeister
Universität Kassel, Nora-Platiel-Str. 4,
34127 Kassel, Germany
leimeister@uni-kassel.de

Helmut Krcmar
Technische Universität München, Boltzmannstr. 3,
85748 Garching b. München, Germany
krcmar@in.tum.de

ABSTRACT
As the importance of services in our society increases, so does the importance of systematic approaches to develop these
services – commonly termed New Service Development (NSD). An increasing proportion of services are now electronic
services delivered over the Internet. The purpose of this article is to derive a set of key attributes that distinguish electronic
from non-electronic services and their potential influence on NSD. These key attributes are then used as a framework for
analyzing NSD literature with regards to their applicability to the development of electronic services. This analysis revealed
several gaps in NSD research. In particular current NSD methods are not well equipped to address the rapidly changing
nature and specific cost structure found in electronic services. Moreover, current NSD methods are not well suited to fully
exploit the various advantages electronic services offer over non-electronic counterparts, in particular, the transparent
feedback generated by service usage and potentials for continuous improvement and rapid deployment of service changes.
Keywords
Electronic service, e-service, new service development, NSD, literature review.
INTRODUCTION
With an increasing importance of the service sector, the management of new service development (NSD) is becoming a key
competitive concern for many companies (Menor, Tatikonda and Sampson, 2002; Johnson, Menor, Roth and Chase, 2000;
Fitzsimmons and Fitzsimmons, 2000; Johne and Storey, 1998; Gallouj and Weinstein, 1997). Despite its importance it is still
not a very well understood topics and ranks behind the research on new product development (Menor et al., 2002).
An increasing proportion of services are now electronic services delivered over the Internet. However, the systematic design
of electronic services is not covered sufficiently in NSD literature. Yet the importance and relevance of designing electronic
services is demonstrated by examples of market success of services like Google, Amazon Web-services, or Salesforce.
Moreover, there is now forming a concerted research effort to address fields like “Internet of Services” and “Service
Ecosystems” (Janiesch, Ruggaber and Sure, 2008; Riedl, Böhmann, Leimeister and Krcmar 2009; Riedl, Böhmann,
Rosemann and Krcmar, 2009). Additional, more general approaches of establishing Service Oriented Architectures are
established and thus exposing coarse-grained business components to simplify the assembly and deployment of business
solutions built as networks of services (Beisiegel, Blohm, Booz, Dubray, Colyer, Edwards et al., 2005).
The purpose of this article is to derive a set of key attributes that distinguish electronic from non-electronic services and their
potential influence on NSD. These key attributes are then used as a framework for analyzing NSD literature with regards to
their applicability to the development of electronic services.
To frame the object of interest a definition of electronic service is mandatory. Rust and Kannan (2003) define e-service as
“the provision of service over electronic networks.” Electronic networks include, but are not limited to the Internet. Other
electronic environments such as mobile networks, ATMs, and self-service kiosks are also included by this definition. In
business science literature this usually refers to an Internet-based version of traditional services (Baida, Gordijn and
Omelayenko, 2004). This includes both, services that only use the Internet as an user-interface but where actual service
fulfillment might include non-electronic channels (e.g., online shopping), as well as services that are entirely delivered