My name is Kathryn Lumley. I am a sophomore at the
University of Florida and am majoring in
Telecommunications. I am a very dedicated and hard working student.
I love to be outdoors.
My family owns a resort in Eagle River, Wisconsin, which we run in the summer.
I am very
down-to-earth and love animals especially wolves and dogs.
You can usually find me either
listening to music, watching tv, playing with my dog, playing softball, or hanging out with friends.
View my resume (doc)
View my blog
With the advent of wide spread personal computer ownership and use, the internet has taken on a new role in addition to the personal communications it has
provided in the past.
Businesses, small and large, have found it very advantageous to advertise on the web as their exposure is much greater than any other medium. In the past the
yellow pages, magazines, newspaper, TV, and radio advertisements carried the bulk of advertising for products and services. With the internet, a prospective
customer only has to use one of the many search engines to locate businesses that may buy or sell specific products. A website advertises your business to a
worldwide audience, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
This is beneficial as many large companies are looking for smaller companies to manufacture individual parts of a whole product they have contracted to produce
for a customer. In turn, many small companies will again contract to a smaller company to manufacture a part for the component they are producing for their
primary customer. Smaller companies utilize the web to sell products and find businesses that offer bids for manufacture or servicing a particular product.
All business web users have the same wish--to make their business known to the greatest number of potential customers possible with the least expense.
The continued progress in computer science allows advertisers to offer greater creativity in designing their websites which in turn gives the potential customer
additional information, photographs, video clips, and more. A customer that is well informed about your product and services is more inclined to do business
with you. The use of the internet makes us increasingly aware of how intertwined and interdependent our businesses and society is.
Equipped with a microphone, a computer, access to the internet, and an opinion, anyone can create a podcast. A podcast presents people with the ability to share
information and opinions to people all over the world. One great quality of podcasts is that they can be used by many different resources for various purposes.
For example, a business could use it to announce a new product, a university might use it to broadcast lectures, a college student possible may use it to get his or her
opinion heard; whatever the use, podcasts offer a great means to broadcast to a large audience.
With podcasts, the listener is in control. No longer do people have to listen to commercials or scan the channels on the radio for content they enjoy. Listeners now
have a choice of what to listen to, when they want to listen to it, and how they listen to it. With the expanding number of podcasts, listeners are certain to find a
topic that interests them. The best characteristic of a podcast is that it costs little money (or it is completely free) to produce and absolutely free to download.
Business owners would be wise to create and routinely produce podcasts because they are a convenient, automatic, cost efficient way to reach customers.
Listeners consent to receiving information from podcasts by subscribing to each individual podcast. By subscribing to a podcast, the listener is showing an interest
in what it has to say. Thus, a business can keep their subscribed customers up to date about new products, sales, and changes of policy through their podcast.
Podcasts relieve the hassle of e-mail lists since SPAM filters do not block podcasts.
Podcasting is a powerful, effective, and easy way of reaching an audience. Whether for pleasure or business, podcasting can broadcast content to millions of
people around the world in very little time.
Encryption is the process of transforming information using an algorithm (called cipher) to make it unreadable to those who do not possess the key. People use
encryption in e-mails to keep security hackers from violation their privacy. Chad Perrin, IT security expert from TechRepublic , says that e-mail encryption is the
last barrier protecting sensitive information from being accessible to people who should not have it. Because privacy and security are essential to business deals,
businesses should utilize e-mail encryption.
As email becomes more prevalent in the market, the importance of email security becomes more significant. Businesses that use e-mail to communicate can
use e-mail encryption to reduce the leaks of sensitive customer data or to keep important business deals private. E-mail encryption is not only useful to businesses
but also to individuals. If you are discussing private matters and sharing sensitive data — such as passwords, social security numbers, home addresses and telephone
numbers, or any of a number of other pieces of information that might be abused — you must use encryption in order to protect this information from being hacked.
From my experiences, encrypted e-mail is relatively easy to set up and use. Additionally, many sites like Thawte and Verisign offer free personal e-mail
certificates that digitally sign your e-mail so that recipients can verify that it is really from you as well as encrypt your messages so that only the intended
recipients can view it. However, there are drawbacks to encryption. For example, encryption is not supported by all e-mail services, such as the University of
Florida’s webmail service. Thus, both sender and receiver need to have e-mail clients that support encryption. Furthermore, in order to use encrypted e-mail both
sender and receiver must know it works. Businesses can train their staff to use encryption, but that business’s customer base does not receive this training; thus,
sending encrypted e-mails to customers is pointless since they do not understand how to use it.
Overall, secure e-mail is a worthwhile investment. For the relatively little time and money spent learning how to use it and setting it up, having a way to send
sensitive data over e-mail securely, without the fear of it being hacked is priceless.
In today’s business world, people are turning to computers to help them communicate ideas. One form of this computer communication is collaborative computing.
Collaborative computing describes a variety of activities where people interact with one another using desktop computers, laptops, and other electronic devices
with communication capabilities. Businesses should take advantage of collaborative computing because it is efficient and useful for visual intense projects.
Information technology expert Stan Raatz says “collaborative computing provides an opportunity for a group of individuals to share and relay information in
such a way that cultivates team review and interaction in the accomplishment of duties and attainment of consensus”. This is precisely what I did in ISM 3004’s
project. As a group member, I shared pictures and my ideas in order to continue our creative conversation and to obtain a consensus on the design of the
advertisement. Once the group reached a consensus, we designed the advertisement and accomplished our task.
Communication over telephone is suitable in some business proceedings. However, the telephone is not capable of supporting communication requiring visual
components. Businesses can turn to collaborative computing to solve this problem. Collaborative computing allows the communication of ideas using visuals
since one can upload documents and images to the particular database for everyone to see.
Collaborative computing is efficient because individuals have the ability to share and modify documents, pictures, ideas, and more to others regardless of
geographical location or time of posting. For example, a team made up of people from around the world is assigned a business project. These team members can
use a collaborative computing facilitating program like Microsoft SharePoint to share their ideas for the project as well as any visuals or documents relating to the
assignment with just a click of the mouse. What is great about SharePoint is that a person can post during any time of the day, so collaborative computing can fit
into anyone’s schedule. Because collaborative computing is convenient, efficient, and useful, businesses should definitely take advantage of this form of
communication.
Excel is a widely-used spreadsheet program that not only can be used for numerical calculations but is also very useful for non-numerical applications. Excel is a
basic tool for anyone who uses data to manage, summarize, report, and analyze. Additionally, Excel is useful to many people such as journalists, business owners,
social scientists, and even students. During this project, I learned to manipulate and organize data using Excel 2007.
The first functions I learned while using this project were the left and right functions. The left function returns a specified number of characters from the
beginning of a string whereas the right function returns a specified number of characters from the end of a string. These tools came in handy when I had to extract
the state abbreviation and zip code of movie rental stores from a cell that had those values and the city name. With over 500 movie rental stores, transferring the
state abbreviation and zip code by hand would have taken hours whereas with the left and right functions it took a matter of minutes. Another tool I used was the
Vlookup, which searches for a value in the first column of a table and returns a value in the same row from a column you specify in a table. For the project there
was a table on a separate worksheet relating each state to its specific region. With Vlookup, I referred to this table from a different worksheet and was able to
match each state with a region in a matter of seconds.
The second part of the project involved a pivot table, which is a dynamic summary report generated from a database residing in a worksheet or in an
external data file according to the Excel 2007 Bible. I found that the pivot table is easy to use and efficient. It can sort and organize endless rows and columns of
data into a manageable, professional looking table. For the project, I used the pivot table to organize data about movie rentals by state, region, store, and average
number of sales. One great feature about Excel and pivot tables is that there are many options to choose when formatting the information. You can show the
numerical data as a sum, average, minimum, etc. as well as format the number with as little or as many decimals as you desire. To make the data easier to find and
more professional looking, I used the auto format function of a pivot table.
The third part of the project required use of goal seek, which uses a single variable to find a desired result. I used goal seek to determine the unit price to
charge for new release rentals for quarter two if I wanted to produce a gross revenue of sixty-thousand dollars. You could use a simple formula to calculate that
but goal seek offers a quicker alternative. The drawback to goal seek is that it is limited to returning one solution. However, for simple calculations, goal seek
offers a fast and error-free alternative. Overall, Excel is a very powerful and efficient tool. In the future, I will use the functions and skills I learned in
this project to impress my employers.
Microsoft Access is a powerful database program that helps you track and report information with ease. Microsoft Access is very useful to businesses because
it has prebuilt applications that you can modify or adapt to changing business needs. It allows the user to collect information through forms in e-mail or import data
from external applications. Additionally, you can use Access to create and edit detailed reports that display sorted, filtered, and grouped information in a way that
helps you make sense of the data for informed decision-making. The practice I received while performing this project is invaluable because Access is becoming
increasingly prevalent in the business world. Future employers will see that I have experience working with Microsoft Access and will see that as a major plus when
deciding whether or not to hire me.
This project introduced me to databases. I found them to be extremely difficult to manage in the beginning. However, once I grew familiar with the location of
specific functions and acquired experience working with the tools, it became easier. Additionally, the “wizards”, included in Microsoft Access, provide step by step
instructions to create queries, reports, and tables, making this process relatively pain free. By completing this project, I realized just how useful and efficient a
database can be especially since databases’ like Microsoft Access can share information, have data consistency, reduce data redundancy, and have easier access and
development for users.
I also learned a lot about tables, queries, and relationships. Tables store all of the data. Once those tables are created, queries can be used to merge the data
into understandable information. I also learned that relationships between tables can be classified as one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many. In the project, the
relationships I created were one-to-many. Through relationships between tables, errors can be reduced because if you update information in one area, Access will
automatically update the information in all other areas that contain the same information.
Access provides functionality with the ability to add, delete, sort, group, summarize, and print data. Additionally, databases like Microsoft Access provide data
integrity, data security, data maintenance, and no data redundancy. Therefore, businesses should use Microsoft Access to organize and control this data.