Perspectives on Personalization

In E-Commerce and mobile commerce, personalization has been recognized as an indispensable element of customer relationships and of Web strategies. However, there are wide differences in how this concept is defined, characterized, and operationalized in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to explore the theoretical perspectives and underlying assumptions exhibited in various views and conceptions of personalization across a number of fields, with the goal of delineating different approaches that might be taken to personalization. Based on a review of personalization that spanned a number of fields, we distill four distinct perspectives on personalization. Each perspective is discussed in terms of several dimensions relevant to design of personalized systems. Following this we discuss several implications for IS research and practice.