Position: Academic and Technical Lead
In line with the need to improve the quality of our services we provide to clients, the purpose of this memorandum is to propose an improvement in XYZ’s plagiarism detection capability. Henceforth are the justification/background, procedure, and other technical details.
Background
Company XYZ provides editing and proofreading services for clients who aim to publish their works to reputable scientific journals. At present, our plagiarism detection capability can only access online and published sources data repositories. There have been a significant number of complaints from our clients about plagiarism issues that may have been caused by our current capability’s limited access. For example, our current capability does not yet compare new essays to articles that we have successfully finished. As a result, some of our employees are recycling their previous works to new ones, resulting to plagiarism issues. There were also some instances that audio recordings were transcribed to become contents of an essay without proper citation. Our current technological capability does not allow us to capture such scenario in checking for plagiarism issues.
It is a commonly accepted fact in the academic community that plagiarism is an unethical activity (Klausman, 1999). The reason for this is that it promotes intellectual dishonesty, and infringement of copyright issues among other things (“What is Plagiarism?”, n.d.). Hence, it is our duty to help our clients adhere to such academic standards.
There are some recognized forms of plagiarism: direct plagiarism, in which the contents of the source are copied word-for-word without explicit citation or quotation; paraphrase plagiarism, in which the ideas of another source are adapted and paraphrased without citation from the original; mosaic plagiarism, in which the words from the original are copied but they are switched in a manner that it does not look like the original; and self-plagiarism, in which someone submits ideas lifted from another work of his or her own but without explicit approval from the authority in which his or her work was submitted to (“What Constitutes Plagiarism?” n.d.). The majority of these plagiarism scenarios of types are already captured in our present capability, but the aforementioned scenarios – specifically the transcribing of audio recordings – is not yet captured. Hence, a significant improvement in our technological capability must be implemented.
Procedure
As a company that uses its own plagiarism checker and the commercially available ones, the propose improvement will necessitate the editing of the current code or program for our plagiarism checker. It will also necessitate the acquisition of more computers to accommodate more disk space for data gathering and storing.
Resources
The primary players for accomplishing the proposed improvement are computer programmers and computer hardware installers. At present, we have two full time programmers in our company, but we will still need to hire another one. We would need an additional ten computers, including all the hardware and software that are needed to gather and store data in them.
Qualifications
The programmers and installers who will be working for this proposal would have to be licensed in their respective fields of expertise. The additional programmer should have a significant experience with actual programming projects as well as in implementing cyber security measures.
Schedule
It is estimated that the entire proposal would be completed within 6 months after its approval. The following table presents its detailed schedule approximations.
Budget:
It is estimated that the proposal will utilize a budget between $15,0000 to $30,000, inclusive of the personnel/employee compensation throughout the 6 months schedule, plus all the hardware and software used.
Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to send a proposal. I am looking forward for your favorable response. Please contact me through my email address (email address here) if more information will be need.
Sincerely,
References
Klausman, J. (1999). Teaching about plagiarism in the age of the internet. California State University Northridge. Retrieved from http://www.csun.edu/~krowlands/Content/Academic_Resources/Technology/Klausman-Plagarism%20and%20Internet.pdf
“What constitutes plagiarism?” (n.d.). Harvard College Writing Program. Retrieved from http://usingsources.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k70847&pageid=icb.page342054
“What is plagiarism?” (n.d.) Ivy Tech Community College. Retrieved from http://wwwcc.ivytech.edu/library/bloomington/help/citing/Plagiarism/whatisplagiarism.html
