Web Personalized Intelligent User Interfaces and

Processes

An Enabler of Multi-Channel eBusiness Services

Sustainability

Panagiotis Germanakos

, Constantinos Mourlas

, Chara Isaia

and George Samaras

Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 5

Stadiou Str., PC 105-62, Athens, Hellas

Deloitte & Touche, STADYL Building, Corner Th. Dervis - Florinis, CY-1065 Nicosia, Cyprus

Computer Science Department, University of Cyprus, CY-1678 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

communication 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

This work was partially funded by PYTHAGORAS, E.P.E.A.E.K.

Germanakos P., Mourlas C., Isaia C. and Samaras G. (2005).

Web Personalized Intelligent User Interfaces and Processes An Enabler of Multi-Channel eBusiness Services Sustainability.

In Proceedings of the 1st Inter national Workshop on Web Personalisation, Recommender Systems and Intelligent User Interfaces, pages 43-55

DOI: 10.5220/0001421300430055

 SciTePress

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 adopted by the mass market more quickly than any other

technology over the past century and is currently providing an electronic connection

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 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) [8]. 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 [4]. 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 [8], [3], 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 [2]. 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 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 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 [1]. 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

ensure the user’s privacy, or how to create a global personalization scheme [7]. 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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