THE WALLACE E. CARROLL SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
MD254: e-Service Operations Management
Spring 2003

MD254 Home
Week 9
e-Service Process Technology: Analyzing Web Site Usage – Recommender Systems 

Assigned Readings
“Recommender Systems,” P. Resnick, and H.R. Varian, Communications of the ACM, March 1997, (http://www.acm.org/cacm/MAR97/resnick.html). 
“Automatic Personalization Based on Web Usage Mining,” B. Mobasher, R. Cooley, and J. Srivastava, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 43, No. 8, August 2000, p. 142-151 (http://maya.cs.depaul.edu/~classes/ect584/papers/mobasher.pdf). 

CASE STUDY: “Amazon.com Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering,” IEEE Internet Computing, January/February 2003. (Download Here)
This article is a report of Amazon.com’s recommendation systems, and a comparison to other possible recommendation systems.

CASE QUESTIONS:
1. What advantages and disadvantages does the collaborative filtering method used in Amazon’s recommender have, relative to the other possible methods?
2. In what way(s) does a product recommendation system such as Amazon’s need to be scalable?

NOTE: If you are interested in learning more about data mining, and website mining in specific, you may want to visit Dr. Bamshad Mobasher’s web site at DePaul University, for his course on Web Data Mining (http://maya.cs.depaul.edu/~classes/ect584/lecture.html) and his page of resources (http://maya.cs.depaul.edu/~classes/ect584/resource.html). 


Keyword Legend
E-SERV = E-Service: 24 Ways to Keep Your Customers …
CRM = CRM at the Speed of Light: Capturing and Keeping Customers …
FUL = E-Commerce Logistics and Fulfillment: Delivering the Goods

Related Readings: For Further Information



Related Readings: Traditional (Person-to-Person) Services

Fitzsimmons & Fitzsimmons, Service Management: Operations, Strategy, and Information Technology, Irwin/McGraw-Hill, 2001, Chapter 5 ("New Service Development and Process Design")

Haksever, et al., Service Management and Operations, Prentice Hall, 2000, Chapter 6 ("Positioning and Marketing of Services"), Chapter 8 ("Design and Development of Services and Service Delivery Systems")