Its been a while since I last wrote here, last Monday, 3 November 2008, I had a meeting with my project supervisor in regards to the progress of the report. It was quite a quick meeting as I just needed to inform her that I would be able to send her a draft copy of the report by 4:00pm for her to review, and provide feedback. I also had an issue with what to do with handing in the report, she said I need to make three copies of the report.

So anyway on Wednesday I received feedback from my project supervisor, and made changes to the report. Over the weekend I got a friend to check for grammatical errors, and on Monday, 10 November, 2008 (which was the due date for the report), I finished the report, and printed three copies of the report. Which came to a total of 180 pages, and used up my last of my printing balance. So now the report is completed, I just need to wait for it to be marked, then I will convert the report into a .pdf document to be sent to the list of recipients who requested a copy.

I will keep you informed of progress.

Cheers,

Herb

With reference to the section of my report called Conclusion and Future Work, the project supervisor gave me a few guidelines, saying that the Future Work should be put into its own separate section. The letter “I” should be removed from this section and all other sections, with the exclusion of the Evaluation section, which can be personalised to my own ideas. She would like the Conclusion to be a full page, and to not include any new information. The Conclusion should talk about the major points of the survey with bullet points to state the main points. The project supervisor termed the second paragraph of the Conclusion and Future Work to be aimed primarily at Future, which must be included into its own Future Work section.

It was decided that the Ethical Considerations section should be included as a sub-section of the research methodology section. With reference to the disclaimer found within the Ethical Considerations section, it was decided that there could be some line stating: “This disclaimer can be found in Appendix A (survey)”. The appendix should have the final survey, and e-mails that were sent.

In terms with the Discussion section, only talk about major points of the survey, stating facts, such as (“close to 50% of the survey”). Once again this section should not include any new information references. The research methodology section should have the letter “I” removed, the letter “I” should only be included in the Evaluation section. The research methodology should include the ethical considerations section.

The limitations section should just include something like “Grapevine Survey was limited to 30 days, and a max of 25 replies which meant not all respondents could have replied”, and also other limiting factors, such as: Small sample, one time, no follow up, not a true random sample, and no pilot survey (survey sent to a small sample of the total respondents to test for issues e.g. questions are too hard). The first paragraph of the limitations section should be removed, and placed into the Evaluation section.

The Otago 2006, and Statistics survey references should just be included in: the Literature Review, and the Research Methodology sections (the Research Methodology section should just provide a discussion of where the idea of the questions came from).

The project supervisor gave me the idea that if I could manage to create a draft of the report, with all of the sections which will be included in the final report, by Monday, then I can send her a copy via e-mail, so she can have a read of it, and make note of any necessary changes which needs to be made to the report. I will now try and get the report ready be Monday, and will post back with any news with regard to the project.

Cheers,

Herb

There was no meeting with the project supervisor last week, as she was sick. So the meeting has been post-poned to this week, on Tuesday 28th of October @ 1:00pm. It should be good to discuss what I have been doing on the report, and to get some feedback.

Thats all for now, I will keep you posted.

Cheers,

Herb Hesketh

Had a meeting with the project supervisor to discuss my progress on the report so far. I showed her what I had been working on, this included: the results section, limitations, and the background section. In the results section it was noted that some of the tables were not needed, as they only consisted of two variables, which could be replaced with describing the results from the table. Some of the tables could be turned into pie charts to visualise the results. In the role section of the results section, some words need to be changed cause they are quite close to what the project supervisor had written in her report. I still need to add questions 19 – 21, however the project supervisor said I am making quite good progress with the report considering there are 4 weeks left to the semester.

With the limitations section it was noted that the limitations need to be directed at the survey more than the actual report, more information could be added to the limitations section, such as: Only 25% (or something similar) so cannot generalise.

The background section, in regards to describing the questions, the need to be grouped into related sections, such as: Size, so it does not seem so long winded.

Thats all for now.

Cheers,

Herb

Last Wednesday was the end of the trial for the grapevinesurveys.com survey I created. Not to worry as I got all the information I need from the survey on the 3rd of October, so now I am just writing up the results. I am not entirely sure if it is the right way to write a results section but I have created 21 tables for each of the 21 questions, and I will be including these in the results section. Each part of the survey has been divided into its own section, such as: role, business, and security sections, under the heading of results. Currently I am upto writing about question 13 results of the survey, the word count at this stage has reached: 12,386 words, just need 15,000 words Its only the draft but hey!

Work that still needs to be done on the report is I think the background section of the report, instead of summarising the 21 questions, they need to be described in sections, and the important questions need to be described as well. Then I need to work on the Limitations of the survey/report, and lastly finalise the report. I will be checking back with my project supervisor @ 1pm on Monday so I will be able to clarify with her if I am in the right direction.

That is all for now, for the progress of the project, I will post back in a weeks time for the progress of the project.

Cheers,

Herb H.

She said that was fine, however I need to work on completing my Literature review this week, start writting about the results of the survey, and finish writting the research methods section about survey design etc.

Also information was given today at the meeting about the presentation, a 20 minute presentation with 5 minutes for questions, and you are allowed to use powerpoint to write 5 slides.

Thats all for now as their is an example presentation at 2:00pm from a project student that I would like to attend.

Cheers,

Herb

As well as showing my project supervisor my progress on the report, I also told her that I had received 15 replies from the survey. She told me to get more replies I should now construct a respondent reminder e-mail which will be sent out to the people who did not reply. The respondent reminder was constructed yesterday (being the 24th of September), and sent out to all the people who did not reply to the survey. I checked the progress of the replies on: http://www.grapevinesurveys.com, and they are now up to 20 replies. So already I have gained an extra 5 replies, and I am expecting 4 more replies, which should hopefully take the survey up to 24 replies, and then I just need an extra reply, and I will have the maximum replies for the survey.

Anyhow thats the progress on the project. I will report back with any news.

Cheers,

Herb

Sorry about the late update, but I was really busy last week. Last week I spent Tuesday finding web-based survey alternatives to moodle survey, the reason for this was I had not received my password for the moodle survey function. I stumbled upon a few which I will include in my report, but some of the trials were too limiting, for example, survey monkey, as part of its trial functionality would only allow 10 replies back from participants. In my case 10 replies were not enough, so in the end I stumbled upon grapevinesurveys.com, which allowed 25 replies, and allowed an unlimited amount of written questions. On Wednesday I was given clearance to the moodle survey function, which after spending a couple of hours trying to get it to work, I gave up as it was overly complicated. I reverted back to grapevinesurveys, and added a username, and password for each participant.

On Thursday I completed the survey, and finished writing the survey e-mail message, this was sent on Friday to the 86 participants.

Today, I checked the progress of the survey, and found out that 9 participants had participated in the survey, I only need one more participant, and I would have fulfilled my estimate. I also had a project meeting with Mary today, and she was quite pleased with my progress, however she did mention that I might want to consider sending a reminder e-mail before the 30 day trial of the survey is up, so I can get more results. It was also decided that in the next two weeks I should have completed the literature review, and have done more work on the introduction, and background sections. Mary wants to see the progress of my report next Monday, being 22/09/08.

Thats all for now,

Herb

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

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