The need for alignment between business strategies and business processes is today manifested in many different ways. This chapter presents experiences from a collaborative process modeling and process design effort performed at Intersport Sweden. The main purpose with the process modelling and process design was to serve, as a solid base for the transformation of Intersport Sweden into the future. In this effort an important part was that the new process design was in clear alignment with the new strategic business model. By a collaborative co-design approach for deriving and designing business process models diverse stakeholders’ knowledge and interest were captured in the development of tangible process descriptions of the future. The new strategic business plan has through collaborative process design been given a meaning and participating actors have become committed to implement this new business strategy.

This paper addresses collaborative research as an action research approach. Many times action research is described as embracing one research organisation and one business organisation. We are challenging this view by introducing the concept of collaborative practice. A collaborative practice can be seen as a cluster of local practices and researchers working together. In this way, a collaborative practice should enable joint learning between, and joint development efforts for, several business practices as well as contributing to general practice and the scientific body of knowledge. Based on a case study within efficient IT Service Management (ITSM), the concept of collaborative practice and its relation to other adjacent concepts (such as local practice, general practice and scientific body of knowledge) have been characterized. Our results should be viewed as preliminary since they are gathered from an ongoing project.

Business strategies need to be aligned with business process models. In this chap-ter experiences from a collaborative process modeling effort performed at Inter-sport, Sweden, for the purpose of creating a solid base for taking a business into the future will be elaborated on. In this effort the new process design is aligned with strategic goals. By a co-design approach for deriving business process mod-els diverse stakeholders’ knowledge and interest are captured in the development of tangible descriptions of the future. Business plans are given a meaning and par-ticipating actors become committed to implement business strategies.

In information systems research, significant attention has been paid to the discrepancy between organizational context and technology. In the IS discourse this is, among other initiatives, expressed as the need to create alignment between business and IT. Translated into the domain of business process management (BPM), this will put demand on achieving alignment between used models in process modeling. An action research approach has been adopted to explore a multi-layered thinking in process modeling, which has been validated through the development and application of a multi-layered framework with a consultancy firm. Applying the multi-layered framework has addressed three areas of concern related to managing alignment 1) focal areas, 2) abstraction levels, and 3) degree of formalism. In this setting, a multi-layered thinking during process modeling and design has facilitated managing alignment of business and IS/IT. Further research however concerns the application of the framework in other settings.

Significant attention has been paid to the improvement of system development practices. There are theories and methods that are to be used for such improvement purposes. The criticism towards these theories and methods is that many of them have a narrow focus on the system development process, methods, and tools. Too little attention is paid to business orientation, organisational aspects and social factors. In this paper we present a framework that goes beyond this narrow focus in order to serve as a support for directing focus during improvement of system development practices. The development of the framework has been driven by experiences derived from four action research projects focusing on the improvement of system development practices. Generated categories from these experiences have been validated theoretically and internally through a multi-grounded theory development process in order to arrive at a practical theory.

A service encounter is conceived as an interactive process between a service provider and a service receiver. It has however largely been analyzed as a non-interactive phenomenon which lead to a superficial and incomplete understanding of the dynamics of service encounters as an interactive process. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether pragmatic concepts could form a foundation for the conception of service encounters as an interactive phenomenon. The results show that in order to capture the essence of interaction in service encounters from a pragmatic view researchers should turn to the concept of action. In order to avoid a one-side view (the customer or the company/company representative) of the service encounter the inter-related actions need to be taken into consideration.