Teaching e-Commerce Personalization Technology: The Need for a Comprehensive View

Personalization technology has become an important topic in e-commerce, fostered by the emergence of the relationship-marketing paradigm. But teaching e-commerce personalization technology is a challenging task, since it requires a balance between marketing and management and technical implementation issues that must be calibrated according to the student's background, all of this without losing a holistic perspective of the subject. In this paper, we describe the result of our experiences in teaching personalization, sketching both a conceptual framework and a set of curricular objectives that provide a balanced and comprehensive view of the field in its current state. The conceptual framework for the topic area puts in relationship technical and business issues as part of marketing in e-business strategy. The main categories are the topics related to "partner interaction", including adaptive hypermedia and filtering of information, and "relationship maintenance", including user profiling and modeling along with common market segmentation techniques as related to the paradigm of relationship marketing. Concepts of human-computer interaction are required to aid in understanding the assessment techniques of personalization techniques, and privacy and legal issues should also be considered. The concept of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems crosscuts interaction and relationship maintenance issues, and could be used as a criteria for curriculum organization in some cases. Seven general curricular goals are identified as key aspects of the curriculum in personalization technology, including foundations of relationship marketing, user profiling and modeling, hypermedia and adaptive hypermedia concepts, the use of personalization as a tool in marketing strategy, CRM, privacy and legal issues and mass customization. The four first aspects are considered as the core of the curriculum, and they should be addressed to some extent depending on the background and interest of the students. The content of each particular course can then be tuned to diverse student profiles by putting more emphasis in some of the goals, without losing the global view of personalization as a component of a global e-marketing strategy. Rule-base personalization systems represent an appropriate case for introducing the technical content of personalization, and marketing oriented content should be approached from a clear concept of relationship value, as the key concept from which marketing tactics and techniques are derived. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)