| Abstract: | The rapidly increasing penetration and use of the Internet, in conjunction with the explosion of various technologies based on it, gave rise to the development of numerous e-services, such as e-business, e-banking, e-government and e-learning ones. The websites providing these e-services collect large amounts of users’ activity and evaluation data. It is necessary to transform these data into useful business analytics that allow a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the e-service, the various types of value it generates, and its whole value generation mechanism, and at the same time provide guidance for its improvement and optimization. In this direction this paper proposes and validates a methodology for transforming users’ evaluation data into practically useful business analytics, which is founded on well established theoretical frameworks from previous research in the areas of IS evaluation, Technology Acceptance Models (TAM), IS Success Models and e-services. It is based on the definition of a three layers value model of the e-service, which includes its main value dimensions and measures, concerning its efficiency, effectiveness and impact on users’ future behavior respectively. This value model is used initially for collecting e-service evaluation data from users and for processing them. From these data are then calculated two classes of business analytics: the average users’ ratings for all value measures, dimensions and layers, which allow the identification of strengths and weaknesses of the e-service at various level; and the impacts of first layer value measures (which are ‘independent variables) on the second and third layer value ones (which are ‘dependent’ variables), which allow a better understanding of the value generation mechanism of the e-service and a rational definition of improvement priorities. The proposed methodology has been applied and validated for an e-learning service provided by the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) to ICT professionals. |
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Greek