Research Report: Individual Assignment
Assessment Weight: 50% (3 deliverables)
Due: Friday, Weeks 4, 8, 12

Objective(s)
This assessment item relates to the unit learning outcomes as in the unit descriptor. This assessment is designed to improve student presentation skills and to give students experience in researching the literature on a topic relevant to the Unit of Study subject matter, critically analyzing current academic papers then presenting results and findings in a referenced written report.

Instructions
For this component you will write a research report and prepare a literature review/ critique on a particular topic and how this topic relates to IT in Business. The topic you select must be directly relevant to IT in Business
All students must have a different topic. Students can choose to write about the same technology, but the approach and the thrust of each paper must be different. For instance, you could look at cloud computing from a security viewpoint, or from an environment impact viewpoint, or from the perspective of a manager trying to reduce their hardware costs. There will be many perspectives to look at each technology and its relation to Business IT.
To ensure this uniqueness, each student must email their topic and title to their tutor within the first week. Your tutor will respond with an approval or with a message that you will either need to choose a different technology or to change the thrust of your paper. Once it has been approved you should
begin by working towards the first deliverable.
Note: It is important to realize, that you must have prior approval for a topic before you can submit. If you submit something for assessment without approval for the specific topic, it will not be graded.
Once you have a topic approved, you cannot change it without consent from your subject lecturer. The first deliverable is in week 4, and is the outline of the paper they intend to write so it is important that students receive topic approval in time to fully consider the structure of what they intend to do.
This assessment is worth 50% and there are 3 deliverables which must be submitted

1. Outline of the paper 5% due end of week 4 (day and time TBA)

2. Draft version of the paper 15% due end of week 8 (day and time TBA)

3. Final version of the paper 30% due end of week 12 (day and time TBA)

The outline will include the title and a description of the sections in your paper and the key topics in each, along with at least five preliminary references and a note as to in which section they will be included.
The draft version is just that, a draft. The first draft can be messy, rough and amenable to change, allowing you to re-mould your structure with successive drafts. You can avoid trying to write perfect sentences and paragraphs (polishing). Additionally, you can include bullet points, sentence fragments, and temporary section headings, but I would expect approximately half of the paper to be near complete at this stage. Don’t worry about being repetitive or boring. Avoid making your writing eloquent, stylistic or succinct in the first draft: you can revise and improve your writing as your rework later drafts. The idea of the draft is to get down initial ideas and develop an overall structure of the paper.
The final version of your paper is the polished version, the approach should follow the same plan as your draft, but obviously some change may have occurred from the draft. You should not use a lot of small sections and bullet points in the final version. Your literature review should be presenting the
state of current knowledge in a specific area and as such, should have a narrative that flows from one paragraph to another. You cannot achieve this with bullet points and small disjoint sections. All references included with your paper must be cited within the paper and be appropriate to the context of the citation.

Some Notes:
• All references must use the Harvard referencing style.
• The length of the paper is to be 2500 words (excluding the references, contents etc.)
• The font of the body text should be 12pt Times New Roman font, 1.5 line spaced
• Section Heading should be in Arial Bold 12-point font
• At NO time should you use Wikipedia as a reference

Submission Guidelines
Your document should be a single word or OpenOffice document containing your report. All submissions will be submitted through the safeAssign facility in Blackboard. Submission boxes linked to SafeAssign will be set up in the Units Blackboard Shell. Assignments not submitted through
these submission links will not be considered.

Submissions must be made by the due date and time (which will be in the session detailed above) and determined by your Unit coordinator. Submissions made after the due date and time will be penalized per day late (including weekend days) according to Holmes Institute policies.
The SafeAssign similarity score will be used in determining the level, if any, of plagiarism. SafeAssign will check conference web-sites, Journal articles, the Web and your own class members submissions for plagiarism. You can see your SafeAssign similarity score (or match) when you submit your assignment to the appropriate drop-box. If this is a concern you will have a chance to change your assignment and resubmit. However, resubmission is only allowed prior to the submission due date and time. After the due date and time have elapsed your assignment will be graded as late.
Submitted assignments that indicate a high level of plagiarism will be penalized according to the Holmes Academic Misconduct policy, there will be no exceptions. Thus, plan early and submit early to take advantage of the resubmission feature. You can make multiple submissions, but please
remember we grade only the last submission, and the date and time you submitted will be taken from that submission.

Adapted Harvard Referencing
Holmes will be implementing as a pilot program a revised Harvard approach to referencing. The following guidelines apply:

1. Reference sources in assignments are limited to sources which provide full text access to the source’s content for lecturers and markers.
2. The Reference list should be located on a separate page at the end of the essay and titled:
   References.
3. It should include the details of all the in-text citations, arranged alphabetically A-Z by author surname. In addition, it MUST include a hyperlink to the full text of the cited reference source. For example;
   P Hawking, B McCarthy, A Stein (2004), Second Wave ERP Education, Journal of Information Systems Education, Fall, http://jise.org/Volume15/n3/JISEv15n3p327.pdf
4. All assignments will require additional in-text reference details which will consist of the surname of the author/authors or name of the authoring body, year of publication, page number of content, paragraph where the content can be found. For example; “The company decided to implement an enterprise wide data warehouse business intelligence strategies (Hawking et al, 2004, p3(4)).”