The Power of One: Gaining Business Value from Personalization Technologies

Rating:
Summary: Thought-leadership on Personalization
Review: Today's digital technologies enable and empower organizations to collect, analyse and store vast amount of customer information. The ability to connect islands of customer information has led to better customer profiling and better marketing strategies.

Various personalization technologies and electronic agents, to some extent, assist customers to navigate the ocean of market information. With our bounded capability to process huge amount of information and to gather all the necessary information for decision-making at any one time, such technological advances are welcome. However, such personalization technologies may intrude and invade privacy. Such are the core themes when it comes discussing about personalization. Such are the challenges of personalization technologies, faced by corporations, governments and individuals.

In "The Power of One", Nirmal Pal and Arvind Rangaswamy has succinctly captured the essence of the current thoughts on personalization and successfully steered through the complex mosaic of the subject to deliver penetrating insights. Pal and Rangaswamy assembled a superb collection of thoughts and ideas together with researched materials on personalization.

Personalization is one of the core building blocks of the Real-time Organization - the ability to sense-and-respond and adapt in the emerging global, digital economy. As noted by Pal and Rangaswamy, "if a firm is fully personalized, it "rents" out to customer just the right set of its assets for just the right amount to serve their individual needs." It provides the basis for enterprise-wide integration. Successful implementation of personalization technologies enables organizations to redefine the meaning of customer-centric.

Overall, this book provides thought-leadership on personalization and is a must-read for business executives. Those who are assessing the impact of personalization and those who are planning to implement the initiative within their organizations can learn about strategic issues (Chapter 1 to Chapter 5) and the nuts-and-bolts of personalization (Chapter 6 to Chapter 11).

Researchers on the subject will value the diversity of personalisation-related issues being addressed in the book. Consumers, like you and me, can gain a lot from the in-depth discussions on privacy found in the book. Readers will find this book easy to read and grasp, as all the contributors have eloquently narrated complex issues into coherent perspectives.

Pal and Rangaswamy customized this book to address personalization and thumbs up to them. It's timely, as personalization technologies may well be the killer-app for the next generation e-business.