Herb Heskeths Weblog

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