Modular Professional Services: Conceptual Goodness and Research Themes

Professional service providers are increasingly confronted with the challenge of integrating digital components and knowledge-intensive activities to standardize complex recurring tasks while remaining agile to offer customized services that fulfill diverse customer needs. Modular service design has been proposed as a mean to enable a sound balance between these contradicting aims. However, the current literature on modularity in professional services reflects inconsistencies and tensions in the concept that have hitherto hindered the development of a common point of departure for further research. This paper seeks to summarize the current theoretical discussion on the modular design of professional services and evaluates its conceptual goodness based on five established design criteria. Our findings identify weak spots in our understanding of the modularity concept in the field of professional services and highlight five prevailing research themes that build a common ground for further research to address them correspondingly from different angles.