Herb Heskeths Weblog

Hi,

Just thought I would provide an project update. Last week I did some more report work in regards, to the research methodology, and literature review sections, I also added some new questions to the survey. Yesterday I printed what I had done so far on the report, and printed a new copy of the survey for the meeting with Mary, yesterday @ 1pm. After Mary had reviewed the survey so made a few suggestions, these suggestions were:

In the disclaimer section, rather than writing: I Herb Hesketh have designed this survey to collect information. It should be changed to: I Herb Hesketh have designed this survey to collect information for my third year BIT degree, final year project.

Other suggestions: I should separate the questions, into different sections, under different headings, the sections which were recommended were: Role, Business, and Security.

Mary suggested that I should create some more questions, such as: What is your occupation? what qualifications do you have, what percentage of this businesses budget is set aside for data security?

Question 8: Does your business have documented procedures for reporting security breaches to the appropriate authorities (e.g., ITS security group)? should be moved to above question 7. Question 12 should be changed to servers rather than workstations as the workstations are repeated in question 10.

For question 13. Rather than describing the technologies there should be room for viewer to write for example. what Integrated Threat Management functions there business provides, or firewalls etc.

There are alot of multi-choice questions so there also needs to be more scale questions. With regard to the research report the following suggestions were given:

With the research methodology part, more references are required, to help give the research report more backing. For example include the reference for: as it is not as intrusive as a telephone, or face-to-face survey something like (****, 1975. Also I need to write why I choose each particular question / set of questions – link back to lit. review. I need to describe Why is 10 replies enough? could say something like Small scale research project, not intending to generalise from the sample. Also need to consider the report in past-tense, refer to myself as ‘the author’ or the researcher.

With the Introductions were made that I should not include the paragraph quote, as the first paragraph, however if I want to use it I must provide my own sentence lead-in. Just like the research methodology more references are required, and E-Commerce needs to be changed to E-Business. The informal use of lanaguage for the introduction section, such as: ‘either being that businesses want to make a quick buck’ needs to be changed to more professional language, refer to the past-tense concept.

With the abstract, once again E-Commerce needs to be changed to E-Business, and the informal language needs to be professional language. Should be worked on when survey results have been sent back as information about the results need to be put in the abstract section in a overall summary type of format.

The literature review section is good, however it needs more information added to it.

Mary also discussed dates with me when things are due. We worked out that this week should be focused on designing the survey further, and that on the 3rd of September being tomorrow, I should send a rough copy of the initial survey e-mail to Mary’s e-mail address. She will then get back to me with any changes that need to be made, and the final copy will be sent out on Friday the 5th of September.

On the 8th of September, next monday, the survey should be finished, as well as the Research Methodology section, on Friday the 12th the construction of the web-based survey should be complete, and a confirmation e-mail should be sent. On the 26th of september the results back from the survey will close.

Thats all I have for now,

I will report back with more information in due course,

Cheers,

Herb