[Sigia-l] Web personalization: 99% bad

[mhurst at markohurstdesigns.com]

>"Where personalization has proven effective is in corporate portals. An 
>employee, customer or partner needs to be shown pages that relate to 
>specific business activities. Companies that have gotten this message and 
>are focusing personalization in portals include Art Technology Group Inc., 
>BEA Systems Inc., BroadVision Inc. and IBM...What's going to happen to 
>personalization technology is it's going to show up in the portal...That's 
>where it's going to find its home."

While I am inclined to agree that I find personalization less effective
than the mystique that surrounds it, I am not quite as fast to condemn it
either. Having worked with several companies over the years that have
implemented one form of personalization or another, I’ve found that many of
the problems associated with personalization have the same roots as many
others on the web. Who's making the decisions: technical/business?
Technology used? Time/budget? And my personal favorite as an IA, decisions
based upon Business Goals, not User Goals. Etc., Etc., Etc. Also, I think
the term ‘personalization’ in many people’s minds may be too limited and
therefore not utilized to its full potential.Many people tend to relate it
only to sales, up selling, or cross selling, so, try this for size


I recently finished a project for a large automotive distributor within the
US, which we built a public website to sell automotive extended warranties
& insurance policies online and allow visitors to get free “real time”
online quotes. Using BEA’s WebLogic Portal 7 we took full advantage of
BEA’s personalization capabilities, which allowed us to do what would have
been impossible in the time/budget constraint otherwise. The visitor issues
we had to solve depended on what information we knew about the visitor at
any point during their visit. Our main concern was the state that they
resided in, as the laws varied by state as to what language could be used,
the type of policy issued, the price of a policy, the content displayed, if
the visitor even could get an on-line quote, or even if a policy could be
sold within that state. So, we utilized BEA’s personalization features to
change the site dynamicly and provide different content, pricing, & offers
“personalized” to the user based upon their state of residence.  So, that
is just one method to apply personalization outside the norm.

As for Intranet personalization, while I agree with “it’s all the rage”
these days
 I have worked with both Oracle’s & BEA’s portal solutions and
I’ve seen projects go exceptionally well, and some not so well for the same
reasons (and others) I mentioned earlier. None of which have anything to do
with personalization being “bad” on its own or the technology used.


Marko



--------------------------------------------------------------------
mail2web - Check your email from the web at
http://mail2web.com/ .