ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the empirical (i.e., Lockean) aspects of information services. The empirical approach measures and analyzes data of an information service and its stakeholders and context. Such data are important for revenue collection (e.g., showing evidence for a bill) and for generating insights to improve the service. This chapter focuses on the latter, because improvement is the final step in design science. The type of data needed for improvement differs for the diverse levels of management decision-making. The empirical analysis can be done at the strategic level by measuring siteaccess, and influencing the audience to increase these numbers by “search engine optimization”. At the operational level web analytics can be used to improve insights in the performance of certain parts of information services. Finally, we discuss user questionnaires as a means of finding improvement suggestions. Topics in this chapter are:
Supplier-oriented performance indicators
Search engine optimization (SEO) and web analytics
User evaluation questionnaires
