Computer technologies that provide solutions for gathering, sorting, manipulating and communicating data and information have revolutionized every aspect of our lives.
Providing better efficiency, unmatched speeds, elimination of geographical barriers and improver communication. This forced people to confront entirely new rights and responsibilities in their use of information and to reconsider standards of conduct shaped before the advent of computers.
Information is a source of power and, increasingly, the key to prosperity among those with access to it. Consequently, developments in information systems also involve social and political relationships– and so make ethical considerations in how information is used all the more important. Electronic systems now reach into all levels of government, into the workplace, and into private lives to such an extent that even people without access to these systems are affected in significant ways by them. New ethical and legal decisions are necessary to balance the needs and rights of everyone.
As in other new technological arenas, legal decisions lag behind technical developments. Ethics fill the gap as people negotiate how use of electronic information should proceed. The following notes define the broad ethical issues now being negotiated. Since laws deciding some aspects of these issues have been made, these notes should be read in conjunction with Legal Issues in Electronic Information Systems.
The Essay on Information Systems in Global Business Today
1. Why is it important to understand the difference between computer literacy and information literacy? Answer: Computer literacy – When you are computer literate, you have a general working knowledge of computers. You understand what they can be used for. Most people know that they can type a paper, create a power point and if you have internet access, you may e-mail and search the World ...
Definition of Ethics
After looking up several online and offline dictionary, we found more than one definition of ethics.
Microsoft’s Encarta Online Dictionary defines ethics as “a system of moral standards or principles”.
While Cambridge Online Dictionary define it as “A system of accepted beliefs which control behavior, especially such a system based on morals”.
We believe that the best definition of ethics is that it’s simply “Principles of right and wrong”.
UNDERSTANDING ETHICAL AND SOCIAL ISSUES RELATED TO SYSTEMS
Ethics refer to the principle of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free moral agents, can use to make choices to guide their behavior.
information technology and information systems raise new ethical questions for both individuals and societies because they create opportunities for intense social change, and thus threaten existing distributions of power, money, rights, and obligations. Like other technologies, such as steam engines, electricity, telephone, and radio, information technology can be used to achieve social progress, but it can also be used to commit crimes and threaten cherished social values. The development of information technology will produce benefits for many and costs for other. When using information systems it is essential to ask, what is the ethically and socially responsible course of action?
FIVE MORAL DIMENSIONS OF THE INFORMATION AGE
A review of the literature on ethical, social, and political issues surrounding systems identifies five moral dimensions of the information age that we introduce here and explore in greater details.
The five moral dimensions are as follows:
1. Property rights and obligations: How will traditional intellectual property rights be protected in a digital society in which tracing and accounting for ownership is difficult, and ignoring such property rights is so easy?
The Term Paper on Project Management For Information Systems
Abstract Information systems (IS) projects are vulnerable to resource cutbacks and the increasing complexity of systems and advances in information technology make finding the right personnel difficult and the associated development costs high. Good project management is essential for success. Some alignment methodologies include IBM's business systems planning (BSP), Robert Holland's strategic ...
2. Systems quality: What standards of data and system quality should we demand to protect individual rights and the safety of society?
3. Accountability and control: Who can and will be held accountable and liable for the harm done to individual and collective information and property rights?
4. Information rights and obligations: what information rights do individuals and organizations possess with respect to information about themselves? What can they protect? What obligations do individuals and organizations have concerning this information?
5. Quality of life: What valves should be preserved in an information and knowledge based society? What institutions should we protect from violation? What cultural values and practices are supported by the new information technology?
KEY TECHNOLOGY TRENDS THAT RAISE ETHICAL ISSUES
Ethical issues long preceded information’s technology – they are the abiding concerns of free societies everywhere. Nevertheless, information’s technology has heightened ethical concerns, put stress on existing social arrangements, and made existing laws obsolete or severely crippled.
The doubling of computing power every 18 months has made it possible for most organizations to use information systems for their core production processes. As a result, our dependence on systems and our vulnerability to system errors and poor data quality have increased. Social rules and laws have not yet adjusted to this dependence. Standards for ensuring the accuracy and reliability of information systems are not universally accepted or enforced.
Advance in data storage techniques and rapidly declining storage costs have been responsible for the multiplying databases on individuals-employees, customers and potential customers-maintained by private and public organizations. These advances in data storage have made the routine violation of individual privacy both cheap and effective. Already massive data storage systems are cheap enough for regional and even local retailing firm to use in identifying customers.
Advance in datamining techniques for large databases are a third technological trend that heightens ethical concerns, because they enable companies to find out much detailed personal information about individuals. With contemporary information systems technology, companies can assemble and combine the myriad pieces of information stored on you by computer much more easily then in the past. Think of all the ways you generate computer information about yourself-credit card purchases, telephone calls, magazine subscriptions, video rentals, mail-order purchases, banking records and local, state, and federal government records (Including court and police records).
The Term Paper on Performance of Information Systems through Organizational Culture
The objective of this paper is to determine the importance of the connection between the organizational culture and the information system which can be vital to achieve essential business goals. However the proper definition of information system (IS) is important, as different people create confusion in this respect, which according to Anderson (1992) it is the system which captures, records, and ...
Put together and mined properly, this information could reveal not only your credit information but also your driving habits, your tastes, you r associations, and your political interests.
Last advances in networking including the internet, promise to reduce greatly the cost of moving and accessing large quantities of data, and open the possibility of mining large pools of data remotely using small desktop machines, permitting an invasion of privacy on a scales and precision heretofore unimaginable.
CANDIDATE ETHICAL PRINCIPLES
Although you are the only one who can decide which among many ethical principles you will follow, and how you will prioritize them, it is helpful to consider some ethical principles with deep roots in many cultures that have survived throughout recorded history.
1. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you (the Golden Rule).
Putting yourself into the place of others, and thinking of yourself as the object of the decision, can help you think about “fairness” in decision
making.
2. If an action is not right for everyone to take, then it is not right for anyone (Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative).
Ask yourself, “If everyone did this, could the organization, or society, survive?”
3. If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, then it is not right to take at all (Descartes’ rule of change).
This is the slippery-slope rule: An action may bring about a small change now that is acceptable, but if repeated it would bring unacceptable changes in the long run. In the vernacular, it might be stated as “once started down a slippery path you may not be able to stop.”
The Report on Ethics in Higher Education
ETHICS IN HIGHER EDUCATION INTRODUCTION: Education does not end with mastery over few languages or subjects. It also means opening the doors of the mind , cleansing the soul realization of the self. We, as Pakistanis do have a rich and huge volumes of spiritual heritage. At various levels of Pakistani Education System in general and the higher technical education in particular, the ethical ...
4. Take the action that achieves the higher or greater value (Utilitarian Principle).
This rule assumes you can prioritize values in a rank order and understand the consequences of various courses of action.
5. Take the action that produces the least harm or the least potential cost (Risk Aversion Principle).
Some actions have extremely high failure costs of very low probability (e.g. building a nuclear generating facility in an urban area) or extremely high failure costs of moderate probability (speeding and automobile accidents).
Avoid these high failure cost actions, paying greater attention obviously to high failure cost potential of moderate to high probability.
6. Assume that virtually all tangible and intangible objects are owned by someone else unless there is a specific declaration otherwise. (ethical “no free lunch” rule.) If something someone else has created is useful to you, it has value and you should assume the creator wants compensation for this work.
References
1. Margaret Lynch (1994).
Ethical Issues in Electronic Information Systems
http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/ethics/ethics.html
2. Richard O. Mason (1986).
Four Ethical Issues of the Information Age
http://www.misq.org/archivist/vol/no10/issue1/vol10no1mason.html
3. Luciano Floridi (1998).
Information Ethics: On the Philosophical Foundation of Computer Ethics
http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/ie.htm
4. Robert Davison and Ned Kock (2004).
Professional Ethics
http://www.is.cityu.edu.hk/research/resources/isworld/ethics/index.htm
5. Richard O. Mason. A Tapestry of Privacy
http://cyberethics.cbi.msstate.edu/mason2/
6. Kenneth and Jane Laudon (2002).
Management Information Systems (Seventh Edition)
