Herb Heskeths Weblog

Had a meeting with Mary today @ 2:00pm to discuss the progress on the project. I managed to complete a draft copy of the proposed contacts which I will be surveying; just before 2:00pm so I was able to show Mary what I had been doing since last Friday on the project. Mary made a few suggestions, some of these suggestions were: I should look at sending my survey to Nelson businesses, an example could be Sealords, rather than having three separate e-mail contacts for Gen-i, I should just concentrate on contacting the Nelson Gen-i which provides NMIT with technical support, to get the e-mail addresses for this contact it was suggested that I talk to Mark Caukill or Ryan Clarke, as they would know. When I have written a confirmation letter to the businesses, I should send a copy to Mary, and Clare Atkins, as they will e-mail somebody at IBM.

I should design a e-mail for confirmation for the businesses, letting them know that I will be sending them the link to web-based survey in the future, but do not allow room for a reply from the businesses. Mary said that this is not important at the moment as it is more important to focus on the design of the survey questions and literature review.

Mary made the suggestion that since the contact list can be added to at anytime I should focus my efforts on constructing the survey, designing the questions, writing in the research methods section of the report why I decided on creating the questions, the process of how I went about getting the contacts e-mail addresses for the contact list, writing background information on the data security technologies which will be involved with the literature review, I will aim to get a rough design ready for next Monday, where I will be meeting Mary at 1:00pm.

The contact list should not be included in the appendix, as this will be breaching the confidentiality of the businesses. Instead explain the process of how I went about finding the contacts.

The research question has now changed to: Data Security in New Zealand E-Businesses. As the E-Commerce businesses are way too hard to find, and the people of the website selling there services would not know the information for the survey questions anyway.

Thats all for now,

I will update this blog with new information when I get it.

Cheers,

Herb

Had a meeting with Mary today @ 2pm to discuss my progress on the project. She made a few suggestions:

- Research methods will be the discussion of the survey, such as why I am using a web-based survey, not a random sample but a planned sample. Aim at least 100 businesses to get 10 results back. The number of results is not important as long as the process is carried through.

- I can use some of the questions from the security survey by otago university but have to acknowledge the fact that the survey is based on questions from the otago survey.

- Start the literature review of the report, report on the research of the data security technologies. I will have to analyse what I have, and get the data security technologies from that.

- Write in the report on each of the data security technologies.

- For the meeting on 27th of Wednesday @ 2pm, bring the plan of the survey design including, why I am using a survey instead of other research methods, a list of businesses I will be sending the survey to (including manager names, and e-mail address). How I will be conducting the survey, other possible sites to host the survey, how will I get the the results back.

- In conjunction with the survey design research for this week, I should be working on the literature review as well. 25 questions is fine for a survey as long as the questions are simple. Bring a sample of example questions to the meeting on Wednesday.

- Read the Questionnaire Design paper which Mary gave to me.

Thats all I can think of at this stage,

You will hear from me soon,

Cheers,

Herb

As you know it has been a week since I last posted on this blog, but I have been busy with my literature research, researching survey design, and research methods. I got a couple of resources from the NMIT Library Learning Center. These were “How To Design Surveys” by Arlene Fink, “How To Ask Survey Questions” by Arlene Fink, “The Survey Methods Workbook” by Alan Buckingham, and Peter Saunders; and “Introduction to Network Security” by Neal Krawetz.

On top of this I have found vast amounts of knowledge from the Internet, which includes resources such as case studies of New Zealand E-Commerce businesses, research on data security methods, whitepapers relating to data security, and alot of references, which I will be looking at (these are mainly books relating to the data security field). Also I have got out from the library a couple of previous research reports by various students, the one I am notably looking at, at the moment is a research report by “Abiot A.S. Mathetha”, “Information Technology Infrastructure Library”. The reasons I am looking at this particular report was that I found the general layout of the report very professional, and it had an example survey with an analysis of the results. I would like to design my report very similar to his, so for me it was a very good resource of information.

That is all I can report back at the moment, but will report back on any progress I have made in relation to my research topic.

Cheers,

Herb

The last date for the project proposal was last Friday being the 1st of August. On Friday 29th of July I handed in my proposal to the project co-ordinator Mary Proctors pigeon hole. And on August the 4th, Monday, Mary Claire wrote back:

“The project committee met on Friday and your proposal has been approved. The committee made the following comments:

- Rather than determining what current best practice is for e-commerce data security, it may be better to focus on finding out what is the current state of e-commerce data security in NZ.

- Unfortunately, Clare Atkins does not have any supervision hours available this semester, so I will be taking the role of your supervisor. This, of course, does not mean that you cannot approach Clare for advice throughout your project.

I would like to setup a weekly meeting time with you. The best times for me are Monday, Wednesday or Friday at 1:00pm. Please let me know if any of these suit you.”

I wrote back to Mary, that 1:00pm Monday would be fine with me, as Monday is the only day I come into Polytech, which means that I can spend the rest of my time spending time with my baby daughter .

Mary wrote back:

“Mondays sound good. I will see you next Monday – until then just carry on with what you are doing and we can make a plan from there.”

I am not too sure if she meant carry on with project work, or generally just carry on with the rest of my studies, so this week the only work I have done on my project, is the work on this post. Hopefully on Monday I can understand more clearly what I should be doing.

Cheers,

Herb Hesketh