CIO Ethical Decision Making

Goal

The ability to objectively assess ethical choices is an essential skill, and the ability to see things from differing perspectives is of utmost importance.The goals of this project are:

• Evaluate a real-world IT ethical dilemma
• Use ethical frameworks to frame responses to ethical dilemmas

Product

Your manager is a busy person. She wants you to provide her with the information in memo form of not more than 2 pages. The general guidelines are as follows:

Describe one ethical IT issue that has arisen in your organization due to the pandemic and the shift to more remote work. Are there specific contexts that must be considered, such as legal or regulatory concerns, guidelines of industry groups or unions, and/or implications to society or the environment that should be considered? Use at least 1 reputable source to support the assertions you make.

Ethical Framework

Considering the ethical issue, think about different frameworks that may be applicable. While there are many frameworks for making ethical choices, and they have overlapping ideas, we will focus on the following five approaches and how they apply to the identified IT ethical dilemma: Utilitarian, Rights, Fairness, Common Good, and Virtue, as described below.

• The Utilitarian Approach -considers alternatives that produce the most good and do the least harm. In the organizational context, for example, good might mean shareholder return and green environmental policies. While the two pull on each other, the organization should decide how to balance the competing outcomes.
• The Rights Approach -respects the rights of all (or most) who have a stake in the decision. For instance, the organization wants to protect the customer, while minimizing cost (to maximize shareholder return).
• The Fairness or Justice Approach -treat people equally or in proportion to each other. For example, the organization wants to treat people equally, based on their value to the organization - e.g., customers receive certain benefits in a consistent manner, employees receive certain benefits in line with their contributions to the organization, and shareholders receive consistently applied dividends. It is sometimes difficult to treat people equally.
• The Common Good Approach -serves the community as a whole and not just some members of the community. An organization might implement updated data security standards, for instance, and may treat all customers the same, whether you spend $10,000 or $10. Competing with these needs, however, may be "preferred" customers, who may get additional benefits or "preferred" suppliers, who may have invested in an integrated system with you in order to receive faster payment for goods and/or services provided.
• The Virtue Approach -leads you to be the sort of person you should be. Legally, a publicly held corporation is a "person." Like you and me, corporations set standards. For instance, they may want to donate to specific charities and receive community goodwill, but they cannot spend all of their profits on outreach (unless they are a non-profit, which is a totally different consideration).

Which of the ethical frameworks did the company use to respond to the ethical IT dilemma? Which other ethical framework could they have used? What outcomes could they expect? Use at least 1 inline text citation to support your assertions.