INSS 300 Management Information Systems

Information Literacy Assignment

One of the objectives of this course is to satisfy the UB Information Literacy Graduation Requirement:

Students will learn the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in personal and professional environments.

To satisfy this requirement we will focus on the following:

1. Using a discipline-specific research tool, mechanism, or strategy to address an information need.

2. Applying discipline-specific evaluation criteria to an information source.

You are the co-owner of a medium sized company (10 employees) that sells commercial 3D printers and printing parts. Your company has revenues of almost $40 million dollars a year. Increasingly, customers have been asking that you allow bitcoin as a payment method. Some of these customers are overseas. 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.

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.

There are many possible business ramifications to adopting bitcoin, but to begin with, at least, you want to limit your focus to your 3 most important issues. Examples might include: understanding how block chain technology works; what are the security risks; how bitcoin exchanges and wallets work in terms of transaction costs; the law as it relates to cryptocurrencies; what is behind the demand for bitcoin payment support; or how to set payment terms to minimize risk or maximize revenue.

Depending on your major you might be more interested in e.g. marketing issues, or finance issues, so your top 3 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 3 most important subtopics or questions you need to understand. Make sure to explain the data you will need to find to address each of these topics.

Now that you have identified the information you need, it’s time to construct a search strategy. For each of your 3 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?

Note, you should describe this step before you go looking for the information.

Deliverable: section two of your paper should describe your strategy for finding the information you identified in step one.

Now that you have developed a strategy, it’s time to test it. Execute your strategy and describe how well it worked.

· 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.

· Did your original strategy lead you straight to it? Or did you have to adjust on the fly?

· Describe your satisfaction with your overall search process, and describe how you would tweak it going forward when doing business research.