How To Find Secondary Data Successfully

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Research can be approached through primary and secondary data collection methods. These methods can be applied to research according to the nature of the subject and research question to be answered. Secondary research can be defined as "The reuse of data for objective of original research question answering with more better statistical methods or answering new notions with old data available"(GLASS, 1976). Coleman report provide an integral example of many reanalysis data in social sciences field (Bowles & Levin, 1968; WILEY & HARNISCHFEGER, 1974).

Secondary data is an information that is used as a source of help from other scientific authors and researchers (Dawson, 2002; Saunders, Lewis, & Thornhill, 2009). In that respect, research books, reports, journal articles and websites of reliable authors and organizations have been used to get information about Cloud Computing and its roots as much as the feasibility concepts. Crucial to this respect there is no room available for choosing any other material as there are cloud building, cloud types, infrastructures, architectures and other concepts are available that are beyond the scope of this research study (Bishop, 2005).

Secondary data is helpful as there are few resource requirements, quick and high availability of data, feasible longitudinal studies; comparative and contextual data and unforeseen discoveries are possible. These benefits lag behind the cons of unmatched data collected, difficult or costly access, unsuitable definition and compilation of data, effect of the initial purpose on data presentation (Berger, Mamdani, Atkins, & Johnson, 2009).

How to find Secondary data successfully:

Official data archives are main source of information. These organizations are aimed at collecting, archiving and disseminating of data for secondary research. For instance, Qualidata in UK is providing learning, research and teaching communities a wide range of a real life time significant data that can be used to reanalyse, rework and compared with temporary data available. Now a day there is a trend of storing electronic data in archives. Web sites are maintained by important data archives and they provide their information stored wherever they are housed. These catalogues usually contain information about data collection mode used, number of subjects, number of variables and subject of original study.

After achieving a dataset that looks authentic and attractive, next step is to obtain a more detailed description of research. Authentic data sets come with more detailed process and methodology information used in collecting data. With official data archives many data sets are available but the problem is to locate them and to judge their credibility. These might include national and regional agencies, universities, colleges, research institutes and individual researchers (Best, 1999).

Internet is wide range information provider but extremely disorganized. There is a need of developing key words to use it more effectively. Some of search machines support logical expressions that permit the use of combination of words to search for the best result. No single search engine covers maximum desired information so it is necessary to use metasearch programmes such as Copernic. Metasearch programmes send search request and then collect search engines, combine results in a single list and then arrange that list into desired or required criterion. Before assessing secondary data they must be screened to check the feasibility and practicality (Castle, 2003).

Modes of Secondary Research

Various methods that can be used in application of secondary research in this paper and other researches can be listed as follow,

Documentary

Survey

Multiple source

Documentary:

Documentary secondary data can be used of your own research or by any other researcher particularly for the historical analysis of any topic based on secondary documentary studies (Long-Sutehall, Sque, & Addington-Hall, 2011). These documents may include minutes of meetings, correspondence, notices, reports to shareholders, transcripts of speeches, diaries and public and administrative records. Furthermore it might include journals, books, newspapers and magazine articles.

We may use written documents to calculate data for our research like through statistical measures for qualitative data conversion or measurement. It may also include non-written data documents such as video recordings, drawings, television programmes, tape recordings, and films. Documentary used in this article includes journal articles, magazine articles, and administrative records. Theories are inevitable part of the research and they provide a development of planning and process improvement techniques as well. Theories are discussed in this research study as there is a conceptual background on the basis of which we can generalize the results concluded from theories. Secondary research of various authors is also considered as an important tool to conclude the importance of cloud computation for Volvo.

Survey based secondary data

It is collection of data through questionnaire that have already been used for analyses of their original purpose. Surveys can be divided in three types: Censuses, continuous and regular surveys and multiple source secondary data. Censuses are the surveys carried out by government and they are unique in nature as participation is mandatory. Continuous and regular surveys are surveys that have been repeated over time. In these surveys, data is collected throughout the year and repeated at specified regular intervals. Researcher gets a useful resource through this method to compare or define a context for own research. Surveys used in this study include all types of surveys available through free access.

Multiple sources

Multiple source secondary data is based completely on documentary or survey data or a combination of the two said. It ensures ease of user to provide a single new and unique dataset through combining different data sets. It can be used in various fields according to the methods of data collection and combination used in it. One way to compile data used in multiple sources is combination and extraction of selected comparable variables from various surveys or from single survey repeated many times to provide a time series data set. Multiple sources are not applies and used in this study (Saunders et al., 2009).

Reliability and credibility

Reliability can be defined as "reliability is the extent of consistency the results show over times and a true representation of the whole population under observation and the other condition of a method to be reliable is the result production under same methodology".

Validity can be stated as "Validity put a check over the extent of measurement of the facts and research that the researcher was aimed at. It can be stated also that either the research method provided an opportunity to hit "the bull’s eye" of research object or not. Generally validity is assured by asking questions, and looking for the answers in the research of other scholars" (Joppe, 2000). Reliability of using secondary data can be measured through checking overall suitability, precise suitability and cost and benefits attached with these methods.

Overall suitability

Overall suitability of the secondary methods can be measured to find that either secondary data answer tour research question or not. Coverage and unmeasured variables can be included to ensure exclusion of unwanted data and ensures of availability of sufficient data after exclusion.

Precise suitability

Precise suitability is measured through Reliability and validity and measurement bias. In reliability and validity trustworthy organizations should be included in databases and inspections should be made in order to analyse the reliability of data collection method and precision needed by user. Measurement can be unbiased through no deliberate data distortion and changes in the way the data originally collected.

Cost and benefits

Costs and benefits are included to analyse what costs are to be faced during process and benefits can be assessed in terms of answering to your question.

Rationale of using Secondary methods

Volvo’s cloud computation is to be tested in this paper. Secondary research is used in a perspective that all the methods and researchers technologies can be encircled in this study. Cloud computation has a wide range of literature and research in cloud building, computation, architecture, systems etc. First of all is documentary method of secondary research in which this paper is aimed at using journals, newspaper articles and magazine articles. Second one is surveys in which study will focus on surveys available online and the last one is multiple that will encompass the paper mainly as paper will use both types of secondary data.

Chapter THREE

Cloud computing is a natural stepped in evolving information technology services and products. The term has been used by various researchers but it became famous when IBM and Google announced collaboration in this domain. Cloud computing encircles the concepts of "cyber infrastructure, virtualization, distributed computing, "grid computing", utility computing, and, more recently, networking, web and software services". It has applications that provide service oriented architecture, reduces the Overhead costs associated with end users, Flexible system, lessen the costs of owner, services on demand and many more things. These all concepts and services are encircled in this part of the paper.

Cyber infrastructure can be defined and conceptualized as

"Cyber infrastructure is an opportunity to make your applications easier to deploy and develop to expand the feasible scope of application s keeping an eye on the budgets available and organizational hazards. It shifts engineers and scientists efforts away from IT development and invert their efforts to research. Cyber infrastructure enhances quality, efficiency, and reliability by capturing commonalities among application needs, and provide facility of efficient sharing of services and equipment.."(Ditto, 2008)

Now days all business are to be dependent upon the IT in direct or indirect way. Volvo also has to be relied upon an infrastructure developed by them, as they know it would be a wrong decision to replace their infrastructure with Information technology services that might steal their competitive edge over others. Cloud computing still needs to reduce the overhead and improve end user productivity.

A strong and powerful is computation through services oriented architectures (SOA). It is known as "delivery of an integrated and orchestrated suite of functions to an end-user through composition of both loosely and tightly coupled functions, and services often network based". SOA has been developed many years ago but it was given relative importance since some years back (Bell, 2008; Erl, 2006; IBM, 2013). Examples of first network based architectures who are service oriented include DCOM, Object request brokers, and remote procedure calls (RPC) based on CORBA specifications (CORBA, 2013). A more current example of the recent cloud technique is "Grid Computing" solutions and architectures (Foster & Kesselman, 2004; Globus, 2013; Hadoop, 2013).

Cloud computing is divided into three kinds based upon the offer of services. SaaS are also known as applications over internet. Users run these applications through web browser. User is not bound to hardware and software that is mainly associate with a limited access as cloud computing provide an open access to internet through web browser. SaaS can be dedicated to current users of internet as an example of SaaS is Google Docs (Sotomayor, Montero, Llorente, & Foster, 2009).

Platform as a Service (PaaS) services are related to division of applications or services online that let the developer manage necessary software or hardware, including also a solution stack. It includes deployment life cycle of all applications and services like design, testing, implementation, integrity, deployment and integrity with databases etc. An example of PaaS is Google App engine. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides services that are related to offering of computer infrastructure. They provide softwares, servers, connections and other resources. And the users see it like an entire infrastructure hosted in the same organization.

Cloud computing have been a focus for many researchers for a long time. We may discuss various methods of building clouds that will give an idea of using cloud computation for management type and proper implications to enhance the effectiveness of system. Sotomayor et al. provided two tools for management of cloud computation: Haizea, a resource lease manager and Open Nebula, a virtual infrastructure manager. Song et al. extended IBM data centre management software in order to deal with cloud-scale data centres. They used a hierarchical set-up of management servers instead of a "central one". A single management server cannot manage all the tasks such as collecting inventory or discovering systems. Single managers partition the endpoints to keep balanced workload in case of increasing managed components or endpoints.

Theories

Débora Di Giacomo and Tino Brunzel applied five different theories on assessing cloud computation performance under these theories. First theory discussed is Transaction cost theory. Transaction cost theory concluded that cloud computing can be used to effectively control the costs as providers achieved. Second theory is agency cost theory; it concluded that it is more difficult to assess cloud computing while providing services and products to a wide range of market. Suppliers explained an uncertainty in providing cloud computing like responsibility of the data stored.

Third Theory is Resource based theory that fit better as compared to other theories, because of affordable price level and nature of services (Cloud computing). They provide standardized services that ensure their customers about common operations. Fourth theory is resources dependence theory, it concluded cloud computing is option available to all companies as it promote changes in IT environment and buying behaviour of IT companies. Fifth and the last theory used is exchange theory, it arrived at conclusion of best strategy to be used in companies IT department. Attraction was a concept clearly represented in the Talentia’s choice for cloud computing. An example in exchange theory is of Talentia who choose cloud computing for their IT department, this not only reduced their costs associated with IT management but also improved decision making of company.

Volvo and cloud computing

Companies’ feel it unease to handle major data as it is not easy to collect, store, search and analyse bid data. Big data is a term that is used to describe voluminous range of data in the form of structured and semi-structured data that is generated by companies. This paper will focus on methods available for Volvo in order to get rid from IT and involve in cloud computing. (Turban, Volonino, Sipior, & Wood, 2011).

Volvo, means "I roll" in Latin, since its start is coming a long way by using an integrative approach of Cloud infrastructure in its entire networks. Cloud computing is defined by Turban and Volonino (2011) as "in which the technology is rented or leased on a regular or as-needed basis". One prolific achievement of Volvo is to create an e-learning solution for African countries and Arab in cooperation of Allied Soft. It has allowed Volvo to provide an Education Service Provider that will allow students, parents and teachers to get an access to e-learning software. Cloud computing has also let Volvo to as stated by Microsoft Case Studies (2011) "address the needs of Volvo for cost effective infrastructure that enables in scaling up the traffic of high volumes quickly and make it server of a global audience along with remarkable performance" (Microsoft, 2013). Cloud also made it easy in all their systems to have software that can never be denied in importance of usage and availability. Cloud made it easy as no one has to wait for IT department to come and start a setup for them that would be needed as it would all be on the network.

As mentioned in chapter one, Volvo is involved in Cloud computing technique in order to find the best solution for getting their management involved in objectives and providing a framework for dealers to feel them strongly bonded. Volvo has decided to use this technology as there is no chance to provide a loophole for any competitor that is expected from the use of IT structure that will not ensure reliability of data shared and saved.