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

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

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

 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

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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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