Managing Corporate Portal Usage with Recommender Systems

Corporate portals are supposed to support a company’s business model and to increase productivity of the employees. However, the productivity gain that can be achieved by corporate portals is often undermined, because the users of the portal are not sufficiently informed about the portal’s capabilities. This is of particular concern for large corporate portals whose service portfolio is constantly evolving and to which new users are added frequently. In this article, we propose a recommender system for corporate portals in order to increase service awareness and usage. Following the design science methodology, a suitable recommender concept is developed and several implementation options are evaluated in a field experiment at one of Germany’s largest companies. It is found that the recommender system increases the number of newly visited services as well as the number of newly used services in the corporate portal by about 20%.