Instructions Your task in this assignment is to research a scenario such as the

Instructions
Your task in this assignment is to research a scenario such
as the the bitcoin scenario given below. You should choose your own topic,
perhaps one you need to research for another class. The process you use to find
information, and how you refine it to produce better results, is what you will
describe in your paper.
Note: this assignment focuses on developing the skills
important to finding the appropriate source materials you would need to write a
paper / essay / business report. You are not writing the paper itself;
you are describing the search process.
Background
You are the CEO of a moderately large software company with sales in 15
international markets. Increasingly, customers have been asking that you allow
bitcoin as a payment method for direct-download internet sales. While you know
some of your competitors use it, all you know about it is what you’ve seen in
the news: that’s its popular, volatile, potentially low cost, and may have
security issues. You need to decide if you will accept bitcoin as a payment
method, and whether it should be allowed as a payment method at all, or only
some, webstores (each country has an online storefront).
Given that you don’t know much about bitcoin, you have
decided to do some research on this topic. This assignment will require you to
document the search process you use in order to find relevant information.
Your first task: decide what information you really need in
order to properly evaluate this idea.
Step
1: Identify the information needed.
There are many possible business ramifications to adopting
bitcoin, but to begin with, you want to limit your focus to 2 or 3 important
issues, which you will identify after a broad general search. Examples might include
taxation; security risks; legal issues; or how to handle currency volatility.
Depending on your major you might be more interested in e.g.
marketing issues, or finance issues, so your top issues may be quite different
to a classmate’s. What is important is that you can articulate what it is you want
to know.
Deliverable: section
one of your paper should define the 2-3 most important subtopics or questions you
need to understand. Make sure to explain what type of data you will need to
find to address each of these topics.
Step
2: Create a strategy
Now that you have identified the information you need, it’s
time to construct a search strategy. For each of your topic areas, describe:
·
Who are the authoritative sources you might look
for? (e.g., scientists/researchers, legislators, business experts, bloggers?)
·
Where will you find the information above? (e.g.,
newspapers, magazines, journals, TV shows, social media)
·
How will you get access to this information –is
it freely available via web search, or via commercial subscriptions like
Gartner, or industry conferences, or held in library databases?
Deliverable: section
two of your paper should describe the information you think you need, and where
you plan to look for it initially.
Step
3: Describe the Process
Now that you have developed a strategy, it’s time to implement
it. Describe the process you use to
find materials. Include your search terms and where you searched (venues), and
describe how you refined your search process as you progressed in order to
improve the quality of results. You can create your own grading rubric to decide
how valuable a particular resource would be.
·
Explain the specific search terms you used, and
how you refined them as you went along
·
Explain how the initial information you found
and read influenced your search strategy
·
Provide a copy of the best article or
information source you located in each of your topic areas (a citation or link
is sufficient as long as it is available online, otherwise include a copy in an
appendix).
·
Explain why it was the most useful resource you
found (refer to criteria in the slides on information search).
Deliverable: section three of your paper should describe
the search refinement process.
Step 4:
Reflection and evaluation
In this section you should reflect on the overall process,
and the lessons you learned that you will implement in future when you search
for information.
·
Did your original strategy lead you straight to the
best material? Or did you have to adjust on the fly? Note, if you are going to
argue “I found what I was looking for straight away” you need to show that you
tried other strategies and were satisfied in the end that the first was the
best.
·
Describe your satisfaction with your overall
search process and describe how you would tweak it going forward when doing
business research.
Deliverable: section four of your paper should discuss
how successful your process was, and how you would improve it in future.
The goal is to fully describe the process you used, to
reflect on what you learned from the exercise, and describe the lessons you
will carry forward. Please use (sub) section headers.
Use APA as your standard when you cite references.