WEB PERSONALIZED INTELLIGENT USER INTERFACES AND
PROCESSES
An Enabler of Multi-Channel eBusiness Services Sustainability
Panagiotis Germanakos, Constantinos Mourlas
Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 5 Stadiou Str., PC 105-62,
Athens, Hellas
Chara Isaia
Deloitte & Touche, STADYL Building, Corner Th. Dervis - Florinis, CY-1065 Nicosia, Cyprus
Keywords: Web Personalization, Multi-Channel, eServices, eBusiness, Sustainability.
Abstract: The explosive growth in the size and use of the World Wide Web as a commun
ication medium has been
enthusiastically adopted by the mass market to provide an electronic connection between progressive
businesses and millions of customers bringing to light the eBusiness sector. However, the nature of most
Web structures is static and complicated, and users often lose sight of the goal of their inquiry. Hence,
practitioners need to alleviate any navigational difficulties and satisfy the heterogeneous needs of the users
to allow web applications of this nature to survive. Main emphasis is given at saving costs, improving
efficiency and growth, competitiveness, expanding markets, create new infrastructures to support B2B and
B2C Web activities and creating more business opportunities, for local and regional governments. This
paper presents the research implications and challenges of the Web Personalization concept as an enabler of
eBusiness Services sustainability with the development of Personalized Intelligent User Interfaces and
processes.
1 INTRODUCTION
This paper
1
focuses on the eBusiness services
delivery sector and analyzes the concepts and factors
that could affect their continuous quality provision
in a multi-channel and widely diverse environment
securing their sustainability. Its main argue is that, in
the new technological emergent environment and the
resulting changing customer requirements, Web
personalization and the developed Intelligent User
Interfaces and processes are considered fundamental
for the provision of adapted and personalized
eServices, via any medium, increasing one-to-one
service delivery and integrity enabling businesses to
retain their customers and therefore to gain a
substantial competitive advantage.
The Internet has been a
dopted by the mass
market more quickly than any other technology over
1
This work was partially funded by PYTHAGORAS,
E.P.E.A.E.K.
the past century and is currently providing an
electronic c
onnection between progressive
businesses and millions of customers and potential
customers whose age, education, occupation,
interest, and income demographics are excellent for
sales. The complicated nature of most Web
structures results in orientation difficulties, since
users lose sight of the goal of their inquiry, look for
stimulating rather than informative material, and use
the navigational features unwisely. As the eBusiness
sector is rapidly evolving, the need for such Web
structures that satisfy the heterogeneous needs of its
users is becoming more and more evident. To
alleviate such navigational difficulties, practitioners
must identify the peculiarities of each user group
and design methodologies and systems that could
deliver up-to-date personalized information, with
regards to products or services. Doing business
electronically, both intra- and inter-firm over
computer mediated networks (eBusiness Watch,
2004), implies a primary focus on commercial
transactions and services delivery between
177
Germanakos P., Mourlas C. and Isaia C. (2005).
WEB PERSONALIZED INTELLIGENT USER INTERFACES AND PROCESSES - An Enabler of Multi-Channel eBusiness Services Sustainability.
In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on e-Business and Telecommunication Networks, pages 177-180
Copyright
c
SciTePress
companies and their customers (consumers (B2C) or
other companies (B2B)), and processes within a
company and between companies. Two different
strategies for improvement of eServices are
identified, process integration (back-end) and
service delivery (front-end) (Top of the web, 2003).
eBusiness aims to deliver better quality of eServices
increasing productivity with focused services to be
provided by various channels and devices, at a lower
cost and time and in a personalized style.
2 THE EBUSINESS SECTOR –
TRENDS AND
OPPORTUNITIES
In today’s evolving business environment, the
eBusiness services sector faces new opportunities
mainly because of the rapid growth of the ICT
challenges. Therefore, main emphasis is given on the
development of multi-channel (especially mobile)
and broadband services to provide more interactive
business services that match the customers’ needs in
terms of easy-to-use, personalized and timely
delivered services. However, for a better
understanding of the impact of ICT in the eBusiness
services and the actions to be undertaken, the related
trends and opportunities embedded in the internal
mechanisms and operational procedures of the
various enterprises have to be realized.
eBusiness is often described as the Small to
Medium Enterprises (SMEs) gateway to global
business and markets exploiting the opportunities
provided by ICT to improve performance.
Nevertheless, SMEs find the opportunities difficult
to grasp (European Commission, 2004). However,
the important trends and challenges introduced by
the new technological advancements and
methodologies are underlining some specific
guidelines for the improvement of the digital SMEs
and consequently of the eBusiness sector. More
particular, such actions emphasize upon the
improvement of networking and new infrastructures
to support more effectively high-level B2B and B2C
activities on the Web; the improvement of
innovation within an organization; the improvement
of the effectiveness of human and knowledge
resource; and the adoption of new interaction
channels, such as mobile business (mBusiness),
cutting the cost and increasing employee
productivity, providing information and services
using mobile devices.
3 SERVICE REQUIREMENTS
AND DELIVERY
3.1 General User Requirements
To get the right information at the right time and the
right place is not so easy for the customers. The
eBusiness sector working at its front or back office,
it has encountered in several times and occasions the
particular problem. Customers’ interaction with the
services has to be improved, and a serious analysis
of customers’ requirements in the area of eBusiness
has to be undertaken and documented and
furthermore examined taking into consideration its
multi-application to the various delivery channels
and devices.
This paper presents, based on studies conducted
(Top of the web, 2003; CAP Gemini Ernst & Young,
2004), some of the user (customer) requirements and
arguments anticipated. They could be clearly
distinguished into: (a) General User Service
Requirements (flexibility: anyhow, anytime,
anywhere; accessibility; quality; and security), and
(b) Requirements for a Friendly and Effective User
Interaction (information acquisition; system
controllability; navigation; versatility; errors
handling; and personalization).
3.2 Multi-Channel Service Delivery
A channel can change the customers’ perception of a
service. If channels are integrated, the introduction
of a new channel is not merely an additional channel
but a new opportunity to improve service delivery.
With regards to the customer, the integration of
channels means more accessible and more flexible
service delivery. Separate development of different
channels for a single service (multi-channel
delivery) can lead to inconsistencies such as
different data formats or interfaces. To overcome the
drawbacks of multiple-channel service delivery, the
different channels should be integrated and
coordinated (Caldow, 2001). Since successful
eServices delivery depends on a vast range of
parameters, there is not a single formula to fit all
situations. However, there have been reported
particular steps (IDA, 2004) that could guide a
provider throughout the channel selection process. It
should be mentioned, though, that the suitability and
usefulness of channels depends on a range of factors,
out of which technology is only one element.
Additional features that could affect the service
channels assessment could be: directness,
accessibility and inclusion, speed, security and
privacy and availability. To realize though their
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potential value, channels also need to be properly
implemented and operated.
The design and implementation complexity is
rising significantly with the many channels and their
varying capabilities and limitations. Network issues
include low bandwidth, unreliable connectivity, lack
of processing power, limited interface of wireless
devices and user mobility. On the other hand, mobile
devices issues include small size, limited processing
power, limited memory and storage space, small
screens, and restricted data entry.
4 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE
MOBILE COMMUNICATION
SECTOR – THE MBUSINESS
EMERGENCE
The anticipation of faster and cheaper W4 (Wireless
World Wide Web), the third generation (3G)
wireless networks as well as the more sophisticated
mobile devices will soon establish mobile broadband
services as the future trend. At the same time there is
a growing number of organizations that plan to
deploy parts of their traditional Web sites for multi-
channel access. This can be an overwhelmingly
difficult task, since several problems have derived in
building and maintaining business applications for
access by heterogeneous platforms. The mobility
emergence has brought to light mBusiness, which
could be easily considered as the logical extension
of eBusiness. mBusiness will create tremendous
opportunities for most innovative companies
allowing them to promote their products and
services effectively and efficiently, by cutting the
cost, increasing employee productivity (working
while they are off-site) and addressing return on
investment on their applications and services. At the
same time, mBusiness will enable them to increase
customer retention, by establishing valuable direct
links with them and strengthen important
relationships by improving to an “anywhere,
anytime and anyhow” interaction achieving the
competitive difference. Moreover, mBusiness could
be considered as a new kind of front-end access to
Adapted and Intelligent Web-Based Systems with
specific capabilities of delivering on demand real
time information, orders, products, and payments
adapted to the individual customer as well as the
context of customer’s work.
5 WEB PERSONALIZATION AS
AN ENABLER FOR EBUSINESS
SERVICES SUSTAINABILITY
Evidently, the demands of mobile users differ
significantly from those of desktop users. Getting
personalized information “anytime, anywhere and
anyhow” is not an easy task. Business Analysts and
Practitioners have to take into account new
adaptivity axes along which the personalized design
of e- and mBusiness services would be built.
However, creating and maintaining a Web site to
support multi-channel access is proved to be quite
costly and also requires significant amounts of work.
Further to this, mobility applications can suffer from
a handful of problems such as: local mobility,
limited mobility, closed mobility and interrupted
mobility. To overcome such problems personalized
intelligent techniques have to be implemented to
enable the development of an open Adaptive
Personalized Mobile Web (Brusilovsky, & Nejdl,
2004). The "Mobile" generation extends the basis of
adaptation by adding models of context such as
location, time, computing platform and bandwidth to
the classic user model and exploring the use of
known adaptation technologies to adapt to both an
individual user and a context of their work. Now,
customer needs imply both, the thematic preferences
(i.e., the traditional notion of profile) the device
profile (i.e., the characteristics of the mobile
device),.To this end, adaptive personalization is
concerned with the negotiation of customer
requirements and device abilities.
Indisputably, the user population is not
homogeneous, nor should be treated as such. To be
able to deliver quality services, eBusiness Services
should be tailored to the needs of individual
customers providing them with personalized and
adaptive information upon request. Although one-to-
one service provision may be a functionality of the
distant future, customer segmentation is a very
valuable step towards that direction. Customer
segmentation means that the customers are
subdivided (ideally per service or group of related
services, based on their demographic
characteristics, socio-economic characteristics,
psychographic characteristics, or individual
physical and psychological characteristics), into
more or less homogeneous, mutually exclusive
subsets of customers who share an interest in the
service.
The issue of personalization is rather complex.
And it becomes even more complicated once viewed
from a moving user’s perspective. The new issues
now also include: what content to present to the
user, how to show the content to the user, how to
WEB PERSONALIZED INTELLIGENT USER INTERFACES AND PROCESSES - An Enabler of Multi-Channel
eBusiness Services Sustainability
179
ensure the user’s privacy, or how to create a global
personalization scheme (Panayiotou, & Samaras,
2004). In addition, there are also many approaches
each of which focuses on a specific area, i.e.
whether this is profile creation, machine learning
and pattern matching, data and web mining or
personalized navigation. Personalization varies from
Link to Content to Context to Authorized to
Humanized levels, with several paradigms to
implement them. Among others these include,
content-based filtering, rule-based filtering,
collaborative filtering, Web-usage mining,
demographic-based filtering agent technologies, and
cluster models. Having these in mind Business
Analysts and Practitioners should develop new
intelligent user interfaces advanced with adaptive
presentation and adaptive navigation techniques that
would take advantage of these constraints to the
benefits of their customers whenever applicable and
provide them with uninterrupted sustainable
eServices.
6 CONCLUSION
The rapid expansion of the adoption of the Internet
as a communication medium, as well as the
explosive growth in the size and use of the World
Wide Web and the need for eBusiness Services to
retain their customers and therefore gain a
substantial competitive advantage results in the
inference that Web Personalization techniques, like
intelligent user interfaces, enable eBusiness services
providers to adopt successfully the new multi-
channel (wireless and mobile) technologies
increasing their eServices provision sustainability
across their market segments. This paper analyzed
key concerns about customers’ requirements for
multi-channel service provision anywhere, anytime
and anyhow, thus re-enforcing core functionality
issues related to mobility, and therefore mBusiness.
All of the above activities, related to eBusiness
Services and eServices delivery, should always be
aligned to the customers’ perceptions and
requirements. Once these are thoroughly realized
taking advantage of the adaptive and personalized
user interfaces and processes, eBusiness services
providers will be in position to retain their customers
by targeting their individual needs, offering quality
adaptive and personalized on demand multi-channel
services delivery, and hence intensifying eServices
sustainability gaining the competitive advantage in
their market segment.
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