In this assignment, you will conduct research to answer five questions about the company that you chose for your final course project in your Unit 1 assignment, and you will submit your research in a well-organized Microsoft Excel file. This work is the first step toward completing your final project.
In today’s marketplace, the ability to support operational and strategic decisions with solid information is a critical competency. Finding information is not difficult today; the hard part is coming up with useful, high-quality information that you can count on. This competency involves several sub-skills, equally important for the business world and for your academic work, including searching for appropriate resources, evaluating the credibility and usefulness of the information you find, and synthesizing the information to make evidence-based decisions.
To locate truly useful information, you need to know what you are looking for and understand the questions you need to ask to get you there. While this assignment will help you build skills in using the library, the Internet is sometimes a better source for answering certain questions. For that reason, you should use both the Capella library and the Internet for this assignment.
Activity Instructions
Gather some basic information about your target company. While you are not required to submit this information as part of your MS Excel file, it will help you answer the questions.
- Official corporate name of the company you chose.
- Headquarters location.
- URL of the company Web site.
- Description of the company’s primary products or services (or both).
- Industry category (or categories) in which this company operates.
Answer the five questions in the list below. Use both the Capella library and Internet search engines to complete this assignment. Do not rely on either one exclusively.
- What is one way that your chosen company is currently using the Internet or social media?
- What is one way that some other company in the same industry as your chosen business is already using the Internet or social media?
- How might Internet or social media use present ethical problems for your chosen company?
- What technology exists that your company should know about as its management considers Internet use?
- What is one way that demographics, global presence, or diversity might impact your companies’ choices about Internet and social media use?
Create an Excel document to house the information for your assignment. Include a row for each of the five questions. Include acolumn for each of the following categories of information:
- Statement of the original question.
- Analysis of the information needed to answer that question and description of any challenges you had answering the question (2–4 sentences).
- Answer to the question with an APA formatted in-text citation.
- Source (or sources) for your answer in full APA citation.
- Your assessment of the credibility of the information you found (2–4 sentences).
- Your rating of the credibility of the source on a scale of 1 to 5, with one being the lowest credibility and 5 being the highest.
- Your description of the search strategy that you used to find the answer to the question.
Use the Excel AVERAGE function to find the average credibility score of all of your sources. Write one sentence to describe the general level of credibility of the material you found. If the average score for your sources was 1 to 3, explain why finding credible sources was difficult. Describe how you will handle this problem in your final project.
Submit the assignment in your Excel document. You are being asked to submit this assignment in an Excel format to demonstrate your basic Excel skills, in preparation for future courses.
Review the Finding Credible Sources scoring guide in the Resources to be sure that you have addressed the grading criteria of this assignment.
Optional Help – Brushing Up on Skills
The purpose of this assignment is to help you learn to search for information that helps you form opinions and support or refute ideas. Use this assignment to practice using the Internet and Capella library for finding information. At the same time, remember that determining the credibility of information that you find is paramount. Of course, sometimes you may not be able to find credible sources. When that happens, you have to decide whether or how to use any sources that you question.
Use the information provided with this assignment (linked in the Resources) to help you search in the library, evaluate your sources, and properly cite each source.
- If you have not used an online research library recently, you will want to access Capella’s Tour the Library presentation.
- Remember the RAILS resources from the second study in this unit.
- To brush up on your search skills, review the Research Guide – MBA.
- To brush up on your APA formatting skills, read the APA Style and Formatting page on iGuide.
- To brush up on your skills in MS Excel, use the Microsoft Tutorials page on iGuide.
- For a better understanding of when to use Wikipedia, read Can I Use Wikipedia?
Note: Your instructor may also use the Writing Feedback Tool to provide feedback on your writing. In the tool, click the linked resources for helpful writing information.
