Human, Ethical and Societal Issues in IS
CIS 677--IS Principles--NJIT Fall 1999
Goal: The purpose of this page is to explore the role of human factors, ethical considerations and societal issues in the design, implementation and maintenance of computer information systems.
Contents:
Ethics--the study of the principles of right and wrong that ought to guide human conduct
Code of Ethics--a set of ethical principles intended to guide the conduct of the members of the profession or the employees of an organization; professional codes of ethics can be seen to address four levels-responsibility to society, to employer, to clients, and to colleagues and professional organizations
Consequentialist Ethical Theories--tell us to choose the action with the best possible consequences; requires predicting what the consequences will be and who will and should receive the benefits of those consequences
Deontological (obligational) Ethical Theories--argue that it is our duty to do what is right; based on the notion that we have already defined what is right in a set of rules that we follow; examples of such rules would be laws and codes of ethics
Individual rights--widely considered (in democratic societies)"goods" that all humans should possess in equal measure such as: life, safety, privacy, property, free speech, fair treatment, due process, and to be treated only as one consents to be treated
Privacy--right of individuals to retain certain information about themselves without disclosure and to have information about them collected with their consent protected against unauthorized access
Database matching--merging separate facts collected about an individual in several databases; may be a threat to privacy
Statistical databases--contain large numbers of personal records which supply information in only a general way; however creative queries can narrow the possibilities that an individual belongs to a certain group; possible threat to privacy
Intellectual property--intangible property that results from an individual's or corporation's creative activity
Copyright--protects the form of expression of intellectual property; recognized in most countries
Patent--protects novel and unobvious discoveries
Trade secret--protects confidentiality of intellectual property through liscenses or non-disclosure agreements
Software piracy--illegal copying of computer software; estimated to cost the U.S. software industry $12 billion annually
Assistive technologies--enhance access to IT and the world at large through IT for handicapped people
Telecommuting--work at home and other locations distant from the office enabled by a computer and telecommunication technologies
Computer-based Work Monitoring--the use of IT to keep track of how, and how much work employees accomplish
Ergonomics--the study of physical relationships between people and the things they use
Whistle Blowing--to report unethical behavior of one's superiors or company to another person in a position to act to stop that behavior
CATWOE--stands for Customers, Actors, Transformations, predominant Worldview, Owners, and Environment; used to develop a rich picture of an information system development situation; in particular it is used with SSM
SSM--Soft Systems Methodology is a modification of Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method (SSADM) which is a popular IS development methodology in the U.K. The major difference is that SSADM is not so concerned with how a system is developed as long as it performs the required function, while SSM considers the whole process with a view that the implementation of an IS may not be necessary
Stakeholder analysis--a process for discovering the underlying world view, goals, and values of the participants in a social system; it involves identifying the participants (stakeholders) working with them to discover their values, and then mapping the conflict between the various stakeholders
Ethical Conflict Web--a diagram which depicts all participants or participant groups in a social system and identifies major and minor sources of conflict; conflict may be in goals, or the perceived path to goals; once identified the conflict should be resolved before a system is created
Utilitarian ethics--a consequentialist view which sees humanity as the most important group and always seeks the action which will further individual rights for all members of society
Egoist ethics--a consequentialist view which evaluates action in terms of what will bring the most good to an individual or an individual organization
Group consequentialism--between utilitarian and egoist ethics, this viewpoint recognizes the good for more than one group but doesn't go so far as to encompass all of society
Normative ethics--the term "normative" refers to an ideal notion, therefore normative ethics is the study of ethics in an idealized view of the world; it could perhaps be distinguised from practical ethics which focuses more on individual situations and cases
Business ethics--the study of right and wrong action in the realm of human economic activities
Professional--an expert whose services are required because of increasing technological or other specialty demands
Professional organization--a group of experts of a particular specialty area which together support one another in the exchanging of current ideas pertinent to their field, the archival of past ideas and experience, and the setting of standards and creation of possibilities for the future advancement of the field
Data shadow--a representation of an individual developed from the data about that person existing in various databases
De-skilling--the reduction of human creative work to monotonous, mechanical processes through the introduction of automation
Human-centered design--a software development philosophy that believes IT or business processes should make a person's work as satisfying as possible
Machine-centered design--seeks to maximize functionality but often at the expense of usability
Summary of IS Ethics and Ethical Frameworks
As the depth and scope of the influence on society of IS grows, consequently so does the influence of the designers of IS. It is increasingly important for us, as IS professionals, to consider the weight of our actions and the possible impact our IS's may have on those who will use them and be affected by their use. The following process (Wood-Harper et al. 1996) can be used to evaluate thoroughly a proposed IS to determine the potential impact of an IS on a group of people. In particular IS professionals should pay attention to four areas which represent the greatest potential for ethical violations in IS: privacy, access, accuracy/completeness, and property (Zwass 1998).
Wood-Harper et al. (1996) present a "basis and rationale" for thorough ethical analysis at the design phase of the implementation of an information system. Their analysis is based on their categorization of four basic schools of normative ethical theory:
In so far as there are appropriate rules--i.e. laws, professional codes of ethics--deontological principles may be used to decide what is "right" or "wrong." In their absence however, IS designers must be able to predict the possible impacts of their work and evaluate the goodness of those impacts.
Ethical analysis involves five steps:
This analysis can easily be worked into the design phase of IS development. Wood-Harper et al. use SSM as an example of this.
SSM is an IS development strategy that may or may NOT end in the production of an IS, and that recognizes that IS's are not isolated to organizations but operate in a real and complex world. A useful model for conducting the analysis phase of design is the CATWOE model--Cus t omers, Actors, Transformation processes, Worldview predominantly held, Owners, and Environment. This model is especially suited to predicting the impact of design features on stakeholders and the environment. In particular, the customers, actors, owners , and worldview components are used to create an ethical conflict web. The IS which maximizes the good for the environment and minimizes the conflict represented in the web has the best design.
Understanding what ethics are and how they can be applied to IS development, some major themes then develop throughout the course of the literature. Some of those are:
All of these issues become very important when professionals are faced with situations where they are ambiguous or in conflict.
Summary of the Lecture on Ethical Issues (lecture notes)
The guest lecturer for the video was Dr. Starr Roxanne Hiltz of NJIT. Dr. Hiltz Ph.D. is in sociology.
The Issues
Several ethical issues were raised at the beginning:
Next Dr. Bieber and Dr. Hiltz went into further detail about human-centered design (HCD) vs. machine-centered design (MCD). In HCD the goal is that an IT or business process should make people's work as satisfying as possible. A drawback is that this type of development is expensive. The goal of MCD is to make an IS as functional as possible, even at the expense of user-friendliness. Where do ethics come into this discussion? Hard-to-use software inflicts pain and suffering and can lead to serious accidents--e.g. Three Mile Island. That's why for critical equipment, i.e. medical equipment, poor interface design can be a serious ethical oversight.
Another issue, when comparing HCD/MCD is directed vs. autonomous activity. How much discretion does the user have in using the system? Is the user there just to push the enter key each time the machine needs to process another activity, or is the user stimulated and challenged to be creative. De-skilling is a word to describe when a person's work becomes routinized to the point of being monotonous. A skilled worker can be reduced to the level of a data entry clerk. One of the main complaints of IS critics is that it creates BORING jobs. Ethical codes don't say anything about making work broad in scope and challenging. (One notable exception, the International Federation of Information Processing Societies stipulate that there is a moral obligation of IS designers to think about the quality of work of users.) On the other hand, deskilling opens up jobs to many more people and extends the range of current workers.
The next issue discussed was surveillance of employees. Unfortunately IS is better suited to measuring the quantity not the quality of work that employees produce. It is important to be careful not to judge employees unfairly for low quantity when quality is high. Setting fair performance objectives is a key ethical decision.
Laws regarding the responsibility of IS designers in relation to the systems they design are lagging behind the times. Lawmakers in general are not familiar enough with IS issues to make comprehensive laws.
Ethical Basics
Ethics is the study of the standards of moral conduct. The term 'moral' indicates a subject that deals with or is capable of distinguishing between right and wrong. Another way to define 'moral' action is that it benefits someone. Who it benefits is an essential question in that light. There are three basic theories:
The ACM Code of Ethics
Most of the rest of the lecture was spent going over the points of the Association of Computing Machinery's Code of Ethics. In general the existence of the code indicates that it is the responsibility of the IS developer to think about the implications of his/her design. What is the context? What could go wrong? How can we prevent bad things from happening? Even in areas such as weapons development, there are ethical rules to be followed.
ACMCOE 1.5 Copyright--It is recognized that if we don't somehow protect a person's right to get credit (monetary) for his/her ideas, then we will run into problems getting people to do original work. Removing the chance of reward by removing copyright laws can destroy the incentive for people to create new things. Investment in software development is all up front and people are very sensitive about that.
ACMCOE 1.7 Privacy--The ACM believes it is a moral imperative for all IS Professionals to strive to protect personal privacy. Privacy is not a right gauranteed by the Constitution. It is necessary for incentives to be created for people to maintain the accuracy and completeness of data collected about individuals. Really there isn't much incentive now which means the only one out there to protect your information is YOU. Related to this is what is called a data shadow, which is the person that the data says you are.
Professional Standards
The last issue discussed was the fact that there is no form of licensing for computer professionals. This means that there is no real way to enforce ethical standards such as the ACMCOE. The worst that the ACM can do is revoke membership, which is not a very serious penalty by anyone's standards. There is a current movement to create a licensing process for IS and engineering. Some of the problems are what to include on the exam, how often a license needs to be renewed, and things like that.
Thus ends the summary of the video lecture on ethics in IS.
Synthesis with Other Weekly Topics
Week 2--Decision-Making/Decision Support Systems (DSS)
There is a clear and simple connection between ethics and DSS. The purpose of ethical consideration is to make decisions that produce the greatest good. Let's look explicitly at the implications of ethical analysis for DSS. We'll start by briefly introducing Sprague's (1980) framework.
Sprague uses Herbert Simon's (1960) model of the decision making process in which there are four steps: the gathering of intelligence, the design of possible solutions, the choice of one solution, and the implementation of that choice. Sprague sees DSS as being a valuable aid at each phase of this process. His model of a DSS has three major components: the data subsystem used in gathering information (intelligence), the model subsystem used in designing and choosing among possible solutions, and the user-system interface. Sprague envisions five subsets of DSS users: the manager who is the end-user, the DSS builder, an intermediary between manager and builder, a toolsmith to create tools for the builder, and a technical supporter to help the builder use the tools. A single user may embody one, some, or all of these five roles. There are a number of places in this framework which merit ethical consideration. Please refer to our summary of ethical frameworks before going on.
The first stage in the process involves gathering information. The scope, accuracy, and completeness of the information in the databases with respect to all participants in the CATWOE framework are crucial to making ethical decisions. If information is missing about one of the participant categories, then it will be impossible to make a comprehensive ethical analysis. However, it is important at the same time to respect the privacy of these participants, not to collect or use information about them in ways to which they would object.
In designing the databases, all of the possible groups that interact with the organization must be included in some fashion. This might include customers as well as non-customers, employees, rival firms, suppliers, and possibly secondary participants, such as the customers of customers. The IS design will involve an iterative process in which representatives of the various stakeholder groups will create a 'rich picture' of the environment, use that picture to develop a model for the system, and then compare the model to the original design specifications. In the process, conflicts between the various groups should surface and be dealt with by changing the system design and/or the business process.
This second stage, the solution design stage, is the point where various decision-making models are brought into play. These models offer various tools for prioritizing, and determining the value of different aspects of a proposed system. The DSS should include tools for incorporating ethical values in the prioritization process. Of particular use might be a GDSS, used exclusively in the IS design process, which allows all stakeholders to take part in the design decisions. Such a GDSS might resemble an expanded version of CASE tools used in software engineering. A feature of this GDSS would likely be a tool for creating the ethical conflict web described by Wood-Harper et al. (1996). This web is a graphical representation of the interests of all participants, and it is useful in pinpointing spots of tension.
The third and fourth stages, decision choice and implementation, should be simple if the second stage was successful in identifying and prioritizing various IS designs. Again, the GDSS could be used for the voting. At this point , all of the proper ethical analysis should have been completed, and the participants should all be somewhat satisfied with the resulting plan. All that is left is for quality assurance that the actual system is built according to the specifications of the design team.
In summary, it is easy to see how ethical analysis and decision making are complementary processes. IS professionals need to make ethical considerations second nature in their design and decision-making activities.
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Week 4--Strategic IS and Business Process Support
The first ethical theory applicable to an organizational environment, as opposed to a single IS development effort, is that of ethical perspective. The various ethical perspectives described in both Zwass Chapter 17 and the other readings pertaining to ethical and societal issues of IS can be seen as being held by various stakeholders in a standard organizational environment. For example, the organization as a whole would most likely hold a group consequentialist perspective while individual employees and executives would most likely hold an egoist (individual consequentialist) ethic. Even more, a person or group can exhibit properties of more than one perspective. How much attention is paid to each varying ethical perspective while formulating an organizational strategy for IS can be a significant indicator of a companies beliefs and intentions. Some organizations, such as Green Peace, hold a Utilitarian ethical perspective as their sole reason for being. This is a prime example of the coexistence between ethics and business strategy. Not only the choice of how to use an IS strategically, but the type of IS to implement has ethical implications.
The first competitive force discussed by Zwass (Chapter 3, p98) is "Erect Barriers to Entry." While preventing additional competition from entering a market is beneficial from an organization's point of view (and even from an egoist ethic by those within the organization), it may not be so to those with a perspective outside the organization. Will the companies buyers and suppliers benefit? Perhaps not. Similarly, the introduction of switching costs seems ethically questionable. Is it proper to knowingly inhibit a customer? The ethical theme apparent here is to remember the ethical perspectives present external to the organization. Normally, it is safe to assume that strategic use IS is being done to benefit the company as a whole (as opposed to just an individual) or all of mankind. It is not always the case, however. A look at the value chain also raises the external perspective issue. In fact, the value chain corresponds rather nicely to a look at perspective external to an organization. It starts with inbound logistics, which deals with suppliers. In requires an organization to look at the ethics of a supplier as well as the effects a decision will have on suppliers. A look at operations will deal mostly with an employee's perspective while outbound logistics deals with buyers or customers. Again, one must appreciate the perspective held by a customer and the effect any decision or IS will have on them.
Although Davenport and Stoddard make no mention of ethics in their 1994 article Reengineering: Business Change of Mythic Proportions, the same ethical analysis that is conducted during the phases of IS development can and should be conducted when an organization is being reengineered. After all, an organization's structure is simply a manual information system. It follows that organizational development should follow some of the same rules as information system development. The same issues that apply to IS development such as privacy, access, property, and especially impact, also apply to reengineering. Again, the employees, stockholders, customers, and suppliers all have a stake in the well- being of the organization as a whole. As a result, they may all have different perspectives as to how or if an organization should be reengineered. What is good for the company as a whole (group consequentialist) may be different than what is good for the executives (egoist) or even the employees (egoist). Through the course of debunking many of the myths attached to reengineering, Davenport and Stoddard surface some ethical issues associated with these myths. At a high level, each ethical perspective may have the following issues with the reengineering effort:
- Group Consequentialist (Organization): Will the reengineering lead to a better company
- Group Consequentialist (Stock Holders): Will the reengineering lead to a more profitable company
- Executives / Employees (Egoist): Will the reengineering mean the loss of jobs, lower or higher wages, an acceptable working environment, etc.
- Utilitarian: Will the reengineering do good or harm to us all, the environment, etc.
The case study of Rosenbluth Travel as written by Clemons and Row illustrates a single example of how strategic use of an IS can be done ethically. At first glance, the travel agent industry would seem to be fairly simply, ethically speaking. But introduce an advanced information system, as Hal Rosenbluth did, and issues appear. First and foremost are the issues of information privacy and data accuracy. When RT began to facilitate the gathering and utilization of information as a basis for improved service, did their client s know that data regarding their travel habits was being recorded? When the VISION system recorded each transaction made on behalf of a client, were the clients asked permission first? Granted, even if the answer was no, this is a minor privacy violation. But it is a violation nonetheless. On the flip side, RT seemed to have a keen sense that data accuracy was as important as the data itself. The fact that the data recorded was routinely checked for accuracy and when ULTRAVISION was introduced was correc ted in real-time shows that RT had a knowledge, or at least a sense that ethics and IS are not two separate animals. Ralph Smith, the RT VP of Industry Relations was quoted as saying that RT sought to use its purchasing power aggressively, but never in an exploitive way goes to show that an organization policy of ethical behavior can work strategically.
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Information is data that has been processed into a form that is meaningful to the recipient and is of real or perceived value in current or prospective actions or decisions. This definition recognizes both the value of information in a specific decision a nd the value of information in motivation, model building, and background building affecting future decisions and actions. Therefore, the quality of information can affect our decision-making significantly.
Daft and Lengel, in their article, indicate that uncertainty and equivocality are the leading obstacles to organizational information processing. They go on to outline a series of behaviors that can be enacted in an effort to overcome these obstacles through the use of structural mechanisms. The authors believe that each structural characteristic, from group meetings to integrators, to direct contact to planning to special reports to formal information systems, to rules and regulations, are components of the whole which will provide the means to reduce ambiguity. However, in summing up the factors to reduce these obstacles, Daft and Lengel do admit that the proposed framework may oversimplify the situation and therefore the solution. They recommend further research of their proposed framework to test their theories.
In this article, Daft and Lengel did not discuss particular types of information systems. In the instances that an example was given from an office environment it was only to briefly further the point they were making at the ti me. However, Daft and Lengel did suggest several new frameworks with which to judge the ambiguity and equivocality of organizations.
Bandyopadhyay's article analyzes literature on information for organizational decision making for its relevance in his desired IIF. He recognizes three general disciplines. Subspecialties within two of the disciplines have very different approaches to the study of information. He establishes criteria for evaluating the literature, discusses each discipline's contribution to information theory and analyzes that discipline's literature by applying his criteria.
Bandyopadhyay does not focus on the decision process. Instead, he puts strong emphasis on establishing a taxonomy, timeliness and measuring the attributes of information. He gives the impression that development of the IIF is possible and desirable. Possibly his operations research background biases these focuses. He is evaluating literature against his criteria for establishing an IIF where other authors may not intend to establish this comprehensive framework.
Although all the authors did not mention ethics in their articles directly, Davis and Olsen, in their article, indicate that bias and errors can affect the quality and value of information. Considering Zwass, Oz and Wood-Harper's ethical theories and frameworks used in their analysis, we still can find the connection between (organizational) information and ethics.
When an organization processes information, it needs to reduce uncertainty and equivocality and to avoid bias and errors. To reach this goal, an organization must take ethical issues into its account. In most information systems, the receiver of information has no knowledge of either bias or errors that may affect its quality. Normally, bias and errors are caused by the ability of individuals to exercise discretion in information presentation. Actually, bias and errors are affected by individual's ethics. In other words, to some extent, the quality of information is greatly influenced by the individual's ethics. As Zwass indicates, the ethical use of information technology involves four principle domains: privacy, accuracy, property, and access. Organizational information processing needs to be supported by information technology. Information technology is a source of material progress and can contribute to the well-being of all of us. However, the use of information technologies can raise some ethical issues. It generates opportunities for a company; it can also harm us. It threatens employment in some job categories. It may be used to invade workers' private life and to make the workplace less congenial. Therefore, the quality of information are usually based on how to use information technology. So, the use of information technology can cause some ethical issues, which can in turn affect the quality of information, if its use is not appropriate.
Bandyopadhyay's article deals with frameworks for information structures used in organizational decision making. In particular, his criteria indicate that the completeness and accuracy of information be evaluated. The completeness and accuracy of information directly affect the ability of decision-makers to make well-informed, ethical decisions. If looked at from a stakeholder analysis perspective, infor mation pertaining to all groups that may be affected by the decision should be completely and accurately gathered by a system.
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Week 6--Cognitive Aspects of Systems
According to the authors of Humans as Information Processors, Individuals establish filters based on their experience, background, customs, etc. These filters are used to screen factors considered unnecessary to a decision. Based on filters, one can argue that many of the individuals involved in the CONFIRM project had (possibly in error) filtered out some factors that the designer thought were unnecessary, but what mostly warranted further examination. For example, it has been said that AMRIS did not fully understand the technical difficulties. Could the designers at AMRIS have miscalculated the technical issues involved in the CONFIRM case because they made assumptions based on their prior experience with the SABRE reservation system. Also, how about the fact that AMRIS failed to understand the system requirements in the CONFIRM case. I have to think that AMRIS did not start the project thinking they lacked this understanding, but instead, assumed they understood all the system requirements and felt confident (maybe overconfident to the point of arrogance) about their experience and knowledge of all the issues involved with the new system.
According to Benbasat and Taylor heuristics can, at times, be biased, incomplete, or fundamentally incorrect (pg 440). During the CONFIRM project, many people seem to be relying more on heuristics than on analysis skills. For example, it seems that AMRIS set out to design the new system just as they had the old. Although, it's difficult to say for sure, but it seems that they used the same biases that were developed during the SABRE project. Since SABRE was very successful, I assume that AMRIS felt comfortable with approaching the CONFIRM system as if they were on "autopilot."
Decision-makers need analytical frameworks within which the uncertainty surrounding the choice can be reduced to an appropriate level. In the CONFIRM case, decision-makers on both sides seem to be basing too much on the frameworks used for SABRE. The procedures, rules, processes etc., employed by decision-makers for the SABRE project were not a complete set that could just be applied to any (or all) other projects. AMRIS and the Intrico partners placed too much emphasis on the framework(s) used during the SABRE project. The rules and procedures used during SABRE were not complete or general enough for us to use as a foundation with which to build other systems.
People tend to have greater confidence in their ability to assess probabilities than is justified on the basis of the evidence (Benbasat & Taylor, pg 442). This might be part of the reason AMRIS (and the Intrico partners) handled the CONFIRM project the way that they did. I suspect that both AMRIS and Intrico were somewhat overconfident in AMRIS's ability to build the new system. This overconfidence might have led some of the parties to take certain things for granted (such as the liaison teams when they decided to visit with the developers only once a week. The actions of AMRIS also seem to have an air of arrogance. AMRIS management ran the project as if they could care less about the clients.
In the article "Behavioral Aspects of Information Processing for the Design of MIS" the authors suggest that "abstract decisionmakers are better suited to handle tasks which require extensive information processing demands." This concept could have played a role in the CONFIRM case. What I mean is that the Intrico liaisons, who where given the duty of discussing all issues concerning the project with the design and development teams. If these individuals where either unable, or not proficient at understanding abstract ideas and concepts they, of course, would not be able to effectively manage the project as needed by the Intrico partners.
After building a system, many analysts will conduct protocol analyses (PA) to observe how well users operate and navigate their systems. During a PA, analyst will observe and record both the user's actions and their thoughts (users are asked to think aloud). Unfortunately, this doesn't always give designers all the information they need. Therefore, they are left trying to piece together information in an attempt to understand why users make certain choices. Unfortunately, users don't all think alike, and their decisions reflect much more than simple random selections. In order to make their system designs better and therefore more effective for users analyst must try to understand some of the factors and motivations users employ as models to operate the system. Some examples of the kinds of factors that can influence users include filtering and ethics. Individuals establish filters based on their experience, background, customs, etc. (Humans as Information Processors, pg 237). These filters steer individual away from some courses of action toward others. Filters can be a very effective way to guide users in the direction we want them to go, but it can be harmful if we want them to evaluate all choices and make decisions based on the facts.
Similarly, ethical standards can be a very strong influence on the decisions and choices users make while operating a system. According to Normative Ethics Theory, ethics is a set of premises used to decide whether an action or decision is right or wrong (Wood-Harper, pp70-71). Even though most decisions asked of users are much less rigid than simple right versus wrong choices, many users still approach them as they are. Therefore, if users make ethical issues out of choices that don't necessarily fit the profile of an ethical question, they make it much more difficult for the designers to build user interfaces that give logical questions that are fundamental to the operation of the organization. Deontological ethics assumes that there is a set of rules to be followed that define what is right (Wood-Harper, pg.71).
In the Huber article entitled "Cognitive Style as a basis for MIS and DSS designs: Much ado about nothing" the author poses the following question:
Can cognitive style research be useful in the MIS/DSS field?
On the surface, it would seem that cognitive style research would benefit future systems design, but in the CONFIRM case there was more than one client, and each client seemed to have their own particular cognitive style. In order to build a system that will be used to support a variety of cognitive styles, we need to study the cognitive styles to find the differences and similarities. An understanding of these will help us to aggregate the similarities together and build system components to support them. The differences in cognitive styles will be much more challenging. There are two basic cognitive style differences that we need to be concerned about. The first is a cognitive style that is unique to one or few of the client partners. For example, one client may have a set of methods or routines they use to make their decisions that are totally different from the methods and routines of the others. In order to support unique methods or routines we need to build system components to support them. But, if we are building system components to support one, might we be taking resources away from the rest. A second cognitive style difference is when two or more cognitive styles conflict directly with each other. In this case, if we build routines to support one cognitive style we will be hurting the others. This disharmony in cognitive styles will make it highly unlikely that we will be able to support anyone. In the CONFIRM case, the client partners were, in effect, causing a kind of disharmony when they each wanted their own user interface. When a design team has to create four three or more user interfaces for one system, the entire system suffers. Each interface will require its own unique programming and testing. Developers now have a three-fold increase in their workload. Granted, if this were the only exception they had to deal with, they would probably survive. Unfortunately, this was not the only problem AMRIS had to contend with. They also had technical problems that they could not resolve.
Newell-Simon introduced two concepts useful in understanding human information and decision processing. These two concepts were the task environment and problem space. A task environment is the problem as it exist; the problem space is the way a particular decision maker represents the task in order to work on it (Davis & Olsen pg. 243). As we can see from these descriptions, it would be very difficult to build systems to support two or more problem spaces. Now, if we take a look back at the CONFIRM case we can see how having two or more clients added to the level of difficulty that AMRIS experienced in trying to develop the CONFIRM system. Specifically, if one or more of the client partners each developed their own problem space, AMRIS would have to program the system to support it. Furthermore, as mentioned above supporting multiple clients can lead to individual needs and/or conflicting needs.
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Systems concepts are fundamental to proper ethical analysis. Consequentialist ethical theories require that the analyst first define a system in which consequences for affected parties are to be defined. Next the analyst must predict what the consequences of the proposed course of action will be. Lastly the analyst makes a decision on a course of action based on the prediction. Deontological theories require that rules be identified to guide ethical decision making. Rules have very little meaning outside of the systems in which they were created. Hence a solid understanding of systems concepts is necessary for the ethical analyst.
In its most basic sense "a system is a collection of components that constitute a whole" (Zwass). From earlier discussion of the WCA model, we know that an organizational information system includes more than just hardware and software, but also participants (people) and business processes. This inclusion of people in the conception of the system was also reinforced during the discussion of HCI and the cognitive factors of IS. Dr. Turoff points out that classical systems theory is constantly seeking boundaries for systems, but that these boundaries really have little meaning in the real world, and have the tendency to hide the fact that people must be a part of the system. Dr. Turoff defers to Churchman when delving further into systems theory.
Churchman, a big name in both ethical and systems theory, was the first person to fully integrate people into information systems--which he calls inquiry systems. He observed that inquiry systems tended to be more Leibnizian (model oriented), or Lockean (data oriented), while organizations themselves tended to be more Kantian (goal oriented). Rather than focusing exclusively on data models or on data itself, Churchman advocated that inquiry systems must support the creation of objectives, must aid in the realizing of objectives, and also in the revision of objectives over time. He envisioned a feedback loop where the IS and the objectives of an organization are in constant dialogue.
A system such as this must take into account the impact of its objectives on the people who are the participants in the system. Hence a basic part of such systems is ethical analysis, whether or not it ever achieves such a name. Churchman named these Singerian systems.
In summary, synthesis of systems and ethical theory provides some interesting and useful guides in the context of the Singerian inquiry system. Specifically, since the system participates in objective formation and realization, and since the objectives participate in design and input to a system there should be features of the system which allow for the measurement of the impact of objectives on people, and methods for using those impacts as input back into the system. In this way ethical analysis becomes a routine part of the operation of the organization.
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AMRIS…CONFIRM system was intended to centralize the reservation process similar to how an Electronic Document Management (EDM) system centralizes the role of document management. CONFIRM was intended to gather and store information in one comprehensive system that would give the client partners a repository of information with which they could use to answer questions. If the CONFIRM system had been finished as planned, it would have provided organizational knowledge similar to what an EDM provides. EDM systems gather, index and store documents of many types in order to give users the ability to search for organizational information in one place. For example, when a user searches an EDM database they will generally find all the documents related to their search criteria. These documents can take the form of letters (Word documents), spreadsheets and any other kind of document contained in the system. Likewise, if the CONFIRM system had been completed as planned, users might have been able to search the database for information regarding clients, businesses and events.
By combining information from the travel, lodging and car rental industries CONFIRM could have provided an important strategic advantage for managers in the Intrico consortium. This information would have been extremely helpful in the development of both long and short-term strategic plans. For example, in the short term, managers could have used the database to put together specials and promotional offers that revolve around local events or activities in the near future. For the long term, managers could have used some of the information to plan for future expansion of their respect businesses. Executives in the hotel industry would have been able to map out plans relating to one or several different scenarios. In a similar way, EDM pulls together information such as concepts and ideas, which are contained in organizational documents and uses them to support information workers.
Information that was to be contained in the CONFIRM database was to include reservations, billing records and scheduling records of local events. By taking a closer look we would find that each of these records would contain many different fields, each recording a particular fact. Facts are the building blocks of a database, which contain important data that can be used to create organizational knowledge. Organizational knowledge is vital for any progressive organization. EDM also plays a key part in building organizational knowledge. But, instead of having records in a database, it tracks documents which contain elements such as indexes, text, titles and other characteristics that, are used to describe the document and it's purpose.
The purpose of the CONFIRM system was to support communication among the related industries of travel, lodging and car rental. In order to have effective communication, we must understand not only our role in industry, but also those of our customers and partners. EDM, on the other hand, is used to support communication among individuals and groups within an organization. This is not to say that EDM is limited to internal communication. EDM can support communication of all kinds and is often used as a tool for communications and intelligence gathering that support companies and their outside partners.
One basic function that both an EDM and a DBMS (Data Base Management System) support is record storage and retrieval. Record storage and retrieval are basic functions that are vital to organizations. Without the ability to record information electronically, organizations would be lost in paperwork. If they chose to keep paper files, organizations would have no way of getting to the information they need. If they are unable to get to the information they need in a timely manner, what good is it? Retrieving information in both an EDM and a DBMS are similar, even though the structure of their storage is considerably different.
The Ethical Systems Analyst
In the field of medicine there is a growing need to capture and store many different kinds of documents. These documents usually are referenced quite frequently when they are new and, to a lesser degree as they get older. As a result, it is extremely important that documents are categorized and indexed according to some set of standard criteria. DBMS (such as CONFIRM) routinely use indexing as a means of organizing information in some type of logical way, so that programs can use the information efficiently.
Additionally, DBMS and DMS need to be effective in order to help organizations achieve their goals. DMS, in particular, should be effective in order to aid an organization in its business practices and to help achieve the objectives of at least three of the normative ethics theories. For example, the Individual Consequentialist theory pursues the objective of maximizing the good for individuals. EDM systems can help in this regard by providing easy access to documents and records used to maintain information on an individual. For example, a DMS in a hospital can help nursing staff to retrieve information about a single patient from a composite medical history file. A second theory called group consequentialist aims to maximize the good for group. As stated before for individuals, DMS and DBMS's can be used to aid users in the service of individuals and groups. And, finally there is the Utilitarian theory, which aims to maximize the good for the entire human race. This is a very ambitious theory and the effects of any one system, whether it be a DMS, DBMS or any other type of system will only be able to play a small role in an overall plan to help the entire human race. The issue of ethics should be important to everyone whether they operate on their own or as a group. Ethical problems often arise out of ignorance. EDM can help to support ethical measures by providing easy access to documents that contain rules and guidelines for both management and employees to follow. EDM also serves as mirror of truth as it presents documents that can never be overlooked or ignored. There are times when some people want to ignore organizational rules. They would rather ignore the ethical guidelines of the organization in order to achieve some type of personal benefit. But, EDM systems do not allow people to hide from the truth. Organizational documents containing the ethical guidelines of the company, should be stored in an EDM for quick retrieval. In this way, companies can avoid disputes that arise when employees claim they didn't know the rules. Therefore, if an EDM is employed throughout a company there should be no way that any employee can claim ignorance to the rules and guidelines of the organization.
Additionally, DMS have the ability to generate business value for the firm in two unique ways. First, companies involved in the publishing industry can generate additional revenue by selling documents to customers. In this way, organizational documents function as a product either by themselves or to support another product. The second way a DMS can create value for an organization is to aid managers in their work. For instance, EDM can improve the information management functions that are needed to manage, control, and operate an organization. DBMS can also help in this regard by producing reports and online queries that give executives the tools they need to make future plans and goals. Moreover, one of the most important benefits of EDM is its ability to expand the scope of information management from mere facts, which often take the form of data records and databases, to concepts and ideas, which are generally captured, stored, and communicated in the form of documents.
Finally, all organizations must record policies, standards, and procedures for both employees and management to follow. To record these items, we can employ both technologies (DMS and DBMS) in a way that compliments the features of each. For example, a DMS can store documents used to communicate policies, and in so doing, they can reference database records that directly relate to the idea. At my workplace, we put together an Intranet for our Human Resources department that contains many documents used throughout the company. In particular, there are parts of the website that pull information from backend databases to make the information more recent and alive.
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Nowadays, information technology is affecting many aspects of our life. Electronic Commerce has become one of the most exciting trends in business. Electronic commerce is sharing business information, maintaining business relationships, and conducting business transactions by means of telecommunications networks. In other words, electronic commerce is doing business electronically, replacing most of the paper and telephone work with computer-mediated information and transaction exchange. The Internet, and the web in particular, is emerging as the principal means for this new way of doing business.
According to Dr. Adam commerce in general means buying and selling. E-commerce is a kind of system to support these buying or selling activities. Electronic commerce is like electronic shopping, ability to search, ability to order and finally purchase products. Prof. Adam also discussed some issues regarding e-commerce. According to him good user interface designs can be maintained by using popular navigational tools. We should also maintain consistency among web pages and make the system as efficient as possible. Security issues, privacy issues, trust issues and network issues needs to be addressed while designing the e-commerce systems.
In Kalakota & Whinston's article, they define the notion of Electronic Commerce and present the history behind its evolution. This article also discusses various forces that fuel the growth of electronic commerce, which are economic, marketing and customer interaction and digital convergence. In this article, Kalakota & Whinston propose a framework for thinking about Electronic Commerce with a case study of how Microsoft is approaching the electronic commerce landscape. Meanwhile, it also focuses on the different types of electronic commerce applications: inter-organization, intra-organization, and customer-to-business. It also shows how E-Commerce fits with other management ideologies and examines some of the managerial issues companies face as E-Commerce becomes the center of attraction at the product, process, system and market levels.
The primary goal of Kalakota & Whinston's paper is to indicate how Electronic Commerce has changed the market for consumers and organizations, and how it demands new management approaches. If used efficiently, Electronic Commerce has the potential to increase corporate profits through better customer satisfaction and retention, new information-based products and services, and improved operations. Kalakota & Whinston's article contributes a sound and logical point of view suggesting that it might not be wise to always to implement E-commerce in an organization. Also, in this article, the authors are successful in predicting the future of E-commerce. In making this prediction they discuss everything they state that they will address in the beginning of this paper with respect to advancements in information technology and a shift to more use of markets to coordinate economic activity.
Kalakota & Whinston have left out the issue concerning secur ity of transactions in their discussion. It in itself is a separate research topic. The development of secure transactions and secure online payment instruments is currently one of the most active areas of E-commerce Research and Development. They think that the issues such as universal access, privacy and information pricing were just evolving and would become increasingly important as more and more people enter in this era of E-commerce.
Over the past few years the term extranet is attracting people's attention. An extranet can be viewed as part of a company's intranet that is made accessible to the companies or that is a collaboration with other companies. This extranet strategy broadens the definition of e-commerce by providing a link between firm's Intranet and Internet. Extranets can be classified into Intronets and supranets. Intronets are extranets where external trading partners receive controlled access behind the initiator's firewall and into the initiator's intranet. In contrast, a supranet is a consortium sponsored and controlled, interorganizational network providing seamless communication services between member organizations across multiple types of applications.
Riggens & Rhee's article lays much emphasis on the above topics, especially on extranet. They think that firewalls are necessary to protect intranets. Information technology applications that utilize Internet technology can make information available to users both inside and outside of the system firewall. Many IS managers realize the advantages and cost savings that can be achieved by using Intranets. In Riggens & Rhee's article, they emphysize the importance of extranets with detailed business examples from major companies like Lucent and Turner Broadcasting System.
Riggens & Rhee, in their article, touch some ethical issues existing in electronic commerce such as privacy of an organization. Firewall is the one they discussed in this article. Through the firewall, we can protect the privacy of an organization to some extent. However, the authors didn't expand this topic in further detail. Actually, nowadays, not only the privacy of an organization, but also the privacy of individuals is also becoming a big ethical issue in electronic commerce. This issue may have bothered many of us. For instance, When you buy something via Internet with your credit card, have you ever worried about whether the companies will use your personal information for other purposes ? Obviously, this issue has become very common among consumers who want to purchase something on line. As electronic commerce is being widely used, this problem will become more serious. Then, how can we protect our privacy when we do business on line? Law and technology will never be enough to solve the ethical issues in electronic commerce because of the complexity of ethics, especially ethics on line. Therefore, individuals and organizations will need to internalize norms of behavior for their online interactions. The ethical issues that arise in electronic commerce are not so different from ethical issues offline. Therefore, it should not surprise us if the most defensible norms for behavior online are identical to norms of behavior offline. Ethics in electronic commerce would seem to call for the following general rules required for individuals and organizations:
As electronic commerce is widely used, we, especially business organizations should pay more attention to the ethical issues, which may be caused by electronic commerce.
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Week 11--Virtual Organizations; IT and Organizational Structure
Information technology(IT) has greatly impacted the way in which organizations are structured. The field of ethics is concerned with decision-making; therefore by examining the ways in which decision-making responsibility is distributed and supported throughout an organization we can understand how ethical principles can be incorporated into designing the supporting information systems.
Orlikowski and Robey (1991) provide a very thorough description of a meta-theoretical framework designed to incorporate IT into the interaction between human actors and the social structures in which they act. The paper resolves conceptual conflicts between subjective and objective views of organizational structure, and provides guidance in thinking about further research into IS development and the impacts of IS in organizations. Pertinent to our discussion of ethics, Orlikowski and Robey discuss the relationship between structures of legitimation and moral sanctions, and the relationship between structures of domination and personal power of individuals in organizations. The first relationship is characterized by norms, and the second by resources.
Structures of legitimation refer to the formal rules of conduct in an organization. These may be contained in a mission statement, a code of ethics, bylaws, state or federal laws, or any other formal explicit set of rules. These rules not only influence the IS developers and users as they shape a new information system, but these rules are in turn reinforced or diluted by the degree to which they are incorporated into the IS design. It is important to understand the reciprocal, recursive relationship of the the structural rules to the actions of the individuals in the organization. This is a very clear situation where ethics may be applied to IS design. The organization's rules represent a deontological ethical system. As the rules have been previously defined and are readily available to the IS analyst, incorporating them into organizational DSS should be relatively straightforward.
Moral sanction refers to the way in which individuals go about deciding what actions are appropriate or not within their organization. Their actions are somewhat constrained by the structures of legitimation, although choosing to defy those structures can result in a change in the structures or other organizational disruption. From a consequentialist perspective, each actor within an organization must make decisions based on maximizing the benefit for himself or herself, or the company (or both if there is no conflict between the two) within the context of the rules of the organization. Each actor knows the rules and chooses to follow or break them of his or her own accord. For example, how do employees choose to use the information to which the organizational IS gives them access? Are there any controls at the IS implementation level that insure that employee use of IT conforms to the stated structures of legitimation of the company?
Norms exist somewhere between the decsions of individual actors and the formalized rules of the organization. Norms most accurately describe which rules are most routinely kept or broken. A careful examination of organizational norms should be performed to determine which should be enforced or changed via the new IS. A technique such as Wood-Harper et al.'s stakeholder analysis, might be employed in this analysis.
Structures of Domination refers to the formalized power relationships in an organization, and are described by which employees have control over which resources. Power is the capacity for each individual actor to implement or prevent the work necessary to achieve the goals of the organization. Power and structures of domination are mediated by organizational resources. The principal ethical issue relevant to these resources is access. Which employees have access to which informational resources, and how will they use their power to help or hurt others or the organization as a whole? What structures have been implemented into the IS to control employee access to information? Lynne Markus and others have shown that IS can very successfully be used to change the power structures in an organization, and IS developers need to think very seriously about the consequences of their design decisions.
While Orlikowski and Robey's discussion was at the very abstract, theoretical level, Zwass (1992) provides a more concrete description of some of the common ways that organizations are structured, how those structures have and continue to change, and some of the elements that influence which structure is relevant to a particular organizational type. In particular Zwass focuses on how IT plays a role in influencing organizational structure. One of the main points he focuses on is the manager's role as a leader of people. The direct impact of a manager's decisions on people, and the example and environment created by the manager require that managers make ethical decisions. An IS should have features which make it easier for managers to make such decisions. This may mean incorporating organizational rules into the decision-making models employed by the DSS. This may be more difficult in an organization where the decision-making is widely distributed among various business units or teams. Another element to consider is the dynamic nature of the organization--just as the organizational structure needs to be able to adapt to the environment with time, so must there be adequate flexibility to incorporate evolving ethical standards.
Mowshowitz (1994) introduces the notion of "virtual organization" in what he calls a "new paradigm" in organizational structure that is made possible by information technology (IT). The key feature of virtual organization is the ability to separate the abstract goals of organizational activity from the concrete means used to achieve these goals. This separation allows two main benefits: first is the explicit definition of organizational goals, second is the ability to catalogue and switch between different methods for realizing those goals. Our discussion of ethics will play a large role in both of these benefits.
First, let's take an organizational goal, supplying parts to build widgets. Virtual organization dictates that one separate the goals of the activity, finding a supplier, from the concrete solutions, the list of suppliers who can meet the need. A manager will have a set of criteria that he/she uses in solving this problem. For example, one might consider the price of the supplies, the proximity of the supplier to the factory, the quality history of the supplier, whether there is a previous relationship with that supplier, and other factors in deciding which supplier to use. Explicit goal formation allows one to examine each of these criteria and focus on the most important ones while discarding the less important or irrelevant criteria. Discarding irrelevant criteria makes for better decision-making, however, deciding which criteria are relevant or not is an ethical decision in and of itself. Managers need to be able to predict and decide which criteria represent threats to the health and well-being on people and organizations.
For example, in choosing suppliers of car parts, a major criterium should be the safety of those parts. Cost issues should not take precedence over safety. Deciding how to prioritize the criteria for decision-making in goal-oriented activity therefore represents an area where managers must have ethical understanding.
The second benefit is the ability to switch between different methods for satisfying goals. In the previous example, this would involve creating and keeping a current list of all suppliers who can make the required car parts. Ethical analysis would involve giving each supplier a safety rating, and perhaps other criteria would require such analysis. In this way not only the ends, but the means of the organizational activity have been thoroughly ethically analyzed.
Mowshowitz paradigm brings up some broader issues. One of these is the inevitable shrinking of the global work force as the concepts of virtual organization become more widely institutionalized. Mowshowitz predicts a day when the work of humanity will be largely completed by a minority of humans. When this happens, he says we will need to find radically different ways to distribute wealth, and new ways to structure work, play and education for individuals. He sees the possibility for a very violent conversion to this new system. Making far-reaching predictions of this sort stretches the ethical imagination of the IS analyst. It is worth our thought and attention to dream of new structures for society that will help avoid massive conflict througout the world moving into the next age.
In summary, ethical considerations need to be incorporated into organizational IS at a fundamental level. Organizational DSS need to be able to warn managers when they are making possibly unethical decisions, i.e. which somehow break a business rule. The relationship between IS and organizational structures and the actions of the individuals needs to be adequately understood so that healthy norms will be created and reinforced. This is part of creating a healthy organizational culture. The means and ends of organizational activities must be scrutined and a way must be found to routinize the ethical analysis involved in their creation.
The Domain of Ethics
What Zwass describes as the three domains of human behavior and decision-making (Zwass, page 612), legal, ethical, and discretionary, can and will vary from place to place. Companies entering the global market are forced to acknowledge this fact. What is legal in one area of the world may not be in another. Likewise, what is considered ethical in one region may not be in another. As a result, a decision considered discretionary may no longer be. In other words, what may have been fairly clear boundaries between the domains when considered from a localized perspective, become blurred and less defined when the decision is global in nature. When making global strategy or design decisions, managers need to at least acknowledge all of these perspectives lest they design or implement strategy or products that are considered unethical to certain and possibly key areas of the world.
Ethical Theories
While the various ethical theories (Consequentialist and Deontological) themselves do not necessarily change from place to place, the relative importance an individual (or group) places on each may. It has been discussed how an individual may have several distinct ethical perspectives when making a decision. For instance, a person may apply both an egoist ethic and a group consequentialist ethic to a situation simultaneously. Furthermore, while this and another individual may both demonstrate pieces of each ethical theory, the relative weight that each individual places on the various theories may differ. In other words, one individual may consider the good of the group over the good of the individual while another may value the good of the individual over that of the group. The globalization of a business magnifies this effect considerably. Different regions or countries will, as a general rule, consider the different theories more or less important to varying degrees. Again managers must be aware of this fact so as to avoid making assumptions that may not be valid in certain areas of the world. For instance, a manager cannot assume that employees will value the will of the company over that of the family or state simply because this is the case in the host country. Furthermore, the consequentialist theories rest upon the idea of 'good', a rather vague ideal that is also likely to differ from country to country. An employee in one country may value monetary gain while another across the world may value additional holiday or vacation time. Similarly, the obligational / deontological theories rest upon the idea of doing what is 'right', an attribute that will obviously vary greatly geographically.
Ethical Issues
While Richard Mason's principal ethical issues (Zwass, p616) of privacy, accuracy, property, and access (PAPA) are issues that exist regardless of location, each region or country handles them differently. It is imperative that IT managers be aware of these differences when designing or implementing an IT solution. For instance, the European Union has implemented more stringent privacy legislation than has the United States. As a result, U.S. companies wishing to collect data from over-seas affiliates may find it difficult due to regulations on trans-border data flow. (Zwass, p620)(Karimi and Konsynski, p180-181) Similarly, some countries may have different views on property laws, i.e. intellectual property. Pirating of software over-seas, where laws in this area can often be lax, is a serious issue for software manufacturers. More significantly, however, are the 'access' issues. Zwass, Karimi and Konsynski, and Ives et al. all discuss the varying degrees of infrastructure present across the globe. In countries with no significant telecommunications network, more difficulties will be present in regards to accessing corporate information systems.
Strategies of Worldwide Corporation
The various strategies associated with the worldwide corporation have their individual ethical implications. The multinational strategy, for instance, allows each country unit to operate almost independently so as to react to local requirements and conditions. This strategy allows local managers to make key decisions with local impact. The fact that the local manager is more attuned to the customs and beliefs of his or her region or country means that the likelihood of what the locals would consider an unethical decision being made is reduced. On the other hand, a global strategy tends to treat the entire world as a single market and may ignore local differences in customs and beliefs. As a result, the corporation with a global strategy is more likely to make a decision that may be deemed unethical in other regions of the world. The trans-national organization is the most flexible structure and also the most attuned to local customs and beliefs.
Global Business Drivers
Some of the common business drivers in the global environment carry ethical implications. The first such global business driver is people. When a corporation decides to distribute its work force it does so with ethical implications. For instance, when a team is dispersed geographically, the tendency is for the team to communicate electronically rather than via voice or in person. As a result, the communication styles of each person become more significant and certain countries or regions may be less effective communicators. Similarly, different regions of the world have different opinions about the value or need for personal ethics. Can one be ensured that the co worker across the country is going to maintain the same level of personal ethics that he or she would expect of coworkers in the same location. Lastly, many would say that moving jobs overseas is itself an unethical act. This fact can be argued, however. Similarly, when products are considered global products corporations must still be aware that the product may not be appropriate in all markets. Regardless of the fact that products are becoming more standard across the world, the development process must consider the varying ethical perspectives of different regions of the world. The ethics of different suppliers and customers will vary as well. One must not assume that they hold the same value system as the company is question.
Challenges to Globalization
Zwass discusses many challenges to globalization of IS (Zwass, p651, table 18.4), many of which are ethically based. For instance, language differences are a barrier to IS that are also an ethical dilemma. One cannot force a user to operate in an unfamiliar language. Cultural traditions and nationalism will also vary from country to country and carry ethical implications.
Making Ethical Decisions
During the process of examining the ethical implications of a decision with global impact, it is important to view the many perspectives that the various regions involved have. This seems to be the general theme running through all of the synthesis so far. Managers need to be extremely aware that multiple perspectives will be present when different regions, whether localized or geographic regions, countries, or continents, are involved . Little can be taken for granted, and when analyzing the decision in question to determine if it is in the legal, ethical, or discretionary domains, one must appreciate that these domains vary in size and shape from place to place. These perspectives are not only of an ethical or behavioral nature, but also apply to legislative and infrastructure type issues. Managers must avoid being too host-country-centric. In other words, they must remember that there are many perspectives on every issue faced and the viewpoint of those in the host country may not be shared worldwide.
The following is a list of the topics/issues that were raised during the chunking discussions for the week on ethics. Some representative explanations or opinions have been included. This list is most likely not exhaustive but should give a good idea of what came up.
a Privacy/Access to personal Information--
a Ethics in the IS Design Process
a Professional Standards and Conduct
a Intellectual Property
a Other Issues
a Bias in computer systems Batya Friedman and Helen Nissenbaum; ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 14, 3 (Jul. 1996), Pages 330 - 347
From an analysis of actual cases, three categories of bias in computer systems have been developed: preexisting, technical, and emergent. Preexisting bias has its roots in social institutions, practices, and attitudes. Technical bias arises from technical constraints of considerations. Emergent bias arises in a context of use. Although others have pointed to bias inparticular computer systems and have noted the general problem, we know of no comparable work that examines this phenomenon comprehensively and which offers a framework for understanding and remedying it. We conclude by suggesting that freedom from bias should by counted amoung the select set of criteriaincluding reliability, accuracy, and efficiencyaccording to which the quality of systems in use in society should be judged.
a Developing awareness of computer ethics K. A. Forcht, J. K. Pierson and B. M. Bauman; Proceedings of the ACM SIGCPR conference on Management of information systems personnel , 1988, Pages 142 - 143
The most important factor in effective computer security is people--their attitudes, their actions, and their sense of right and wrong. This workshop will explore the ethical problems and issues raised in the computing environment: Topics to be discussed include misuse of computers, concepts of privacy, codes of conduct for computer professionals, disputed rights to products, defining ethical, moral, and legal parameters, and what security practitioners should do about ethics. Audience opinions will be welcome as they will aid in developing ethical standards for the information systems profession.
a Principles, techniques, and ethics of stage magic and their application to human interface design, Bruce Tognazzini; Proceedings of the conference on Human factors in computing systems , 1993, Pages 355 - 362
Magicians have been designing and presenting illusions for 5000 years. They have developed principles, techniques and ethical positions for their craft that this paper argues are applicable to the design of human/computer interfaces. The author presents a number of specific examples from magic and discusses their counterparts in human interface design, in hopes that human interface practitioners and researchers will, having recognized the applicability of magic, go further on their own to explore its domain.
a Toward an ethics of persuasive technology, Daniel Berdichevsky and Erik Neuenschwander; Commun. ACM 42, 5 (May. 1999), Pages 51 - 58
Technologies have always influenced our lives and how we lead them, but for the most part, their effects on our attitudes and behaviors have been incidental, even accidental. For example, automobiles and highways helped create the American suburbs, but they were not invented with the intent of persuading tens of millions of people to commute to work every day. Early computer spreadsheets gave us the number-crunching abilities needed to model future financial decisions, but did not advise us to take particular actions or reward us for what their designers might have viewed as “good” choices....
a Technological humanism and values-driven design; Brenda Laurel; Proceedings of the CHI 98 summary conference on CHI 98 summary: human factors in computing systems , 1998, Page 104
While believing in the primacy of sensation and observation as how we know the world, humanists employ a methodology that submits these observations to reason, and, sometimes not so obviously, to ethical consideration. Humanistic work is values-driven work. It is work that one does because one thinks it is a good thing to do. It is also work that relies on empirical methods and clear-eyed observation. In this talk I will explore the application of humanistic values and methods to the design and development of interactive media, discussing specific examples from the application domain of play-oriented computer software for little girls. I will advocate an approach that is intended reconcile the seeming contradictions between empirical methods and values-driven work.
a How men and women view ethics; Jennifer Kreie and Timothy Paul Cronan; Commun. ACM 41, 9 (Sep. 1998), Pages 70 - 76
Because employees are often faced with making decisions where an ethical dilemma exists, we were interested in exploring opinions regarding: Was the behavior ethically acceptable? What influenced the ethical judgment? Using scenarios similar to these, we asked study participants whether a person’s behavior was acceptable or unaccept-able, and what factors influenced their judgment. The results of this study should give managers and supervisors some insight into employees’ decisions when faced with ethical dilemmas.
a Beyond the code of ethics: the responsibility of professional societies; Richard S. Rosenberg; Proceedings of the ethics and social impact component on Shaping policy in the information age , 1998, Pages 18 - 25
Drafting a code of ethics for a professional society is a daunting and exhausting task. Whereas the basic components of a professional code of ethics or professional standards are reasonably well understood, the specific details require careful tailoring to meet the needs of a given profession. The difficulty of this process probably explains why such codes are rarely updated. Furthermore, once having produced an updated ethics code, many professional organizations, or perhaps better the associated executive, feel that their work has been completed and that they can now present themselves to their countries and the international community as responsible and even concerned societies. But is their work really over? The answer proposed in this paper is a resounding no. I argue that a professional society must provide active and comprehensive support to its members as they seek to do the right thing. In this regard, the Web pages of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) are compared as evidence of each society’s commitment to its members. I also argue that professional societies must make this commitment and as importantly, be seen to be making it.
a Clinton Proposes Rules To Protect Medical Privacy Yahoo! News Friday, October 29th, 1999
Clinton proposed regulation, which would apply to medical records stored in computers but not to those kept on paper, amounting to the first comprehensive national standards for safeguarding such records.
Interesting Related Sites and Information
a ISWorld Net Professional Activities Professional Ethics Home Page A must-see for IS professionals!
a The Lamps to Guide Our Paths--Links to IS Professional Organizations' Codes of Ethics
a Who said these guys weren't ethical? Other organizations' codes of ethics
a Selected Classics in the Ethics Literature
Last update on 12/15/99 by James Del Guidice , Yawei Zheng, Dennis Hennessy, and Morgan Benton