Rochester, NY

By Erika  |  2009/09/01 17:14 Posted in RIT  |  Comments (0)

I’ve officially moved into my new apartment in Rochester, NY. I made the 10-hour trip from central Virginia with my family. I’ve been here for five full days and am getting used to my new location–I drove around town a few times and today I rode my bike a few miles on the Lehigh Valley Trail. The trail runs along the Genesee River which intersects the Erie Canal a few miles from my apartment. The trail is great because it takes me about 4/5 of the way to RIT so I won’t have to ride my bike on busy roads.

I start classes at RIT next week on the 7th. Two of my three classes start at noon and the third is on Thursday nights at 6pm. I’ll be taking 12 credits (4 credits each) each “quarter.” They call the sessions “quarters” instead of semesters since there are four sessions: fall, winter, spring, and summer, although I’m not required to take courses during the summer quarter. My courses this semester for my degree in HCI are:

  • Foundations in Human-Computer Interaction
  • Research Methods
  • Programming for the WWW (using PHP)

Even though I don’t have classes this week I have two orientation sessions, one on Wednesday and the one on Thursday. I’m really looking forward to the orientation meetings because I’ll get to meet other graduate students, especially IT graduate students.

Reflecting on my work at J&J

By Erika  |  2009/08/09 19:20 Posted in Johnson & Johnson  |  Comments (1)

I’ve worked on several different projects over the past two and half months at J&J:

  • Learn SharePoint
  • Migrate PE University to new SharePoint site
  • Modify and create Medical and SIRO dashboards
  • Create Diversity SharePoint site
  • Create Other  PE methodologies SharePoint site
  • Conduct project research–emerging markets in China (affinity analysis, etc.), professional education of surgeons (internal and external benchmarking), postoperative care for joint replacement

Many of the classes I took in the ITI program correlate with the work I’ve completed at J&J:

  • Management of Technological Organizations
  • My independent study with Claire–using a survey to conduct research
  • Social Informatics
  • Database Systems (in Ireland)
  • Information Systems (in Ireland)
  • Application of Research in Information Technology

When a team in the department is working on a project and wants to share information such as documents, meeting dates, and team availability, I am able to create a new SharePoint site for the group based on their specifications. The “Management of Technological Organizations” was a very helpful course, because it provided me with a general overview to understanding the dynamics of knowledge that can be captured in collaborative technology. This course was a good starting point to understanding some of the theory behind sharing information and knowledge in a corporate setting, while the internship was a great way to complete the circle by putting into practice the various theories I had learned. Two examples where teams needed knowledge sharing capabilities online are the Diversity team and the PE methodologies that would be shared among various departments in J&J.

My independent study with Claire was also very helpful for my internship. With my internship I conducted a survey of several undergraduate classes to understand how students learn about different majors. In conducting the survey, I had to analyze approximately 250 open-ended questions. This work was very similar to “affinity analysis” I did for survey results from J&J employees about emerging markets in China. I had to sift through about 10 survey responses with 30+ open ended questions to figure out the similarities that existed between responses. These similarities were then used by a team to create a new business model for China.

Learning about social networks in Social Informatics was helpful to the research I conducted on interactive physician networks and social networks sponsored by healthcare companies to teach physicians about their products and surgical procedures. Understanding the context of social networks, that people are bound up through the practice of using networks on the Internet, helped me discover networks I would not have otherwise considered. While websites like Twitter and LinkedIn are obvious networks that physicians use to communicate with one another, other not so obvious networks also exist. Physicians could also use an electronic database to share surgical best practices through photos of their procedures.

Database Systems, Information Systems, and Application of Research in Info. Tech. were by far the most useful for my internship. Because I worked with SharePoint, I was able to put my database knowledge to good use. One feature in SharePoint allows a person to open a list of data (set of records) in Microsoft Access. Without my knowledge of databases and using Microsoft Access, I wouldn’t have known how to manage information in SharePoint, because sometimes situations required exporting a list of information to Access. When I had to change all the variants of a location in the People Profile list from “U.S.,” “United States,” or “USA” to “United States of America,” I had to change a large amount of records at once. To accomplish this change, I opened the list in Access and went down a column and replaced all the variants to one version. Without my knowledge of databases it would have taken me much longer to learn how to navigate the program and understand the structure of the data in the file.

The Information Systems course I took in Ireland was one of the most useful courses for my internship. It greatly expanded on some of the theory I learned in Management of Technological Organizations, by covering in more detail the business logic behind different types of information systems such as strategic information systems, transaction processing systems, decision support systems, executive information systems, enterprise portals, and expert systems. The course also covered in detail dashboards, key performance indicators, and OLAP technology which I found aided my work on the Medical and SIRO dashboards in SharePoint.

The Applications of Research in Info. Tech. was also one of the most useful courses for my internship. Before I took this course I didn’t give much weight to the importance of data, statistical analysis, and visual representations of data, such as graphs and charts. One key insight I took away from this course was the fact that data and its visual representation are a very powerful tool. I’ve worked with data and charts in Excel and SharePoint a lot since I started the internship. I’ve created dashboards in SharePoint and linked them to Excel sheets containing further dashboards and data, proofread Excel sheets for mistakes, and working with Excel data in general.

Friday, July 31

By Erika  |  2009/08/04 21:54 Posted in Johnson & Johnson  |  Comments (0)

I continued work research on SharePoint capabilities and research for the Horizon’s project.

SharePoint research for the week involved searching for a way to “calculate” a link to a person’s MySite webpage. There is a list of people profiles for the department on the PE website, which was manually entered by each person in the department and by other people in PE departments around the world. There is a also a parallel feature on SharePoint called a MySite which is akin to a Facebook profile page that stores a person’s contact information and any other work related information about a person (skills, projects, documents, etc.). Mike wanted me to figure out a way to combine both the people profile list entries with the MySite pages. He suggested putting a MySite link into a column to associate the page with their entry on the SharePoint list. In order to automatically generate the link to a person’s MySite page, the SharePoint list first have to find a person’s account name (if it is not manually entered by the individual at time of data entry). I discovered that there is no function that will generate a person’s account name in a calculated field,  but figured out a seperate way to achieve this goal. Since the people profile list already contained everyone’s email address (the first part of the email address before the “@” symbol being their account name), I created a calculated field that would acquire the first part of the email address (using Excel functions) and then concatenate this account name to the beginning of the MySite web address. This method automatically generates a MySite link for each of the profile entries in the SharePoint list, saving me time from having to manually enter each address. (This method only works if the user has already entered either their email address or account name.)

MySite pages are similar to Facebook pages and allow people to connect with other employees who share similar duties, skills, employer location, etc. By integrating (adding a link for each person on a Sharepoint list), people won’t have to manually enter information already stored in SharePoint. Much of this information is already automatically generated on a MySite page, like phone number and position. MySite pages act as a central repository with information that can be used through out SharePoint sites, saving people who manage SharePoint sites time and effort.

I spent most of my time this week continuing research for the Horizons project. Like last week, I am still finding information for the postoperative care of women who undergo bariatric or orthopedic surgery. The team has already come together and discussed our findinds with the team leader. This week we are researching topics for which the team discovered we need more information. On Wednesday we’ll come together again via conference call to discuss our findings, after which we’ll either divy up the topics again to fine tune our research or develop further questions to answer.

Doing research for the Horizon’s project is a great opportunity to fine tune my research skills in a team setting. The other two team members generally use different information sources from myself. After we share our findings I go to the sources and try to figure out the thought process they went then when searching for information to answer the questions for a given topic.