First of all, the term ethics is also known as moral philosophy. This is the branch of philosophy that highlights the issues regarding morality. To be more exact, questions and concepts such as good and evil, virtue and vice, right and wrong, justice and crime, are few examples to illustrate what is ethics and why it is important and vital in our life.
Ethics are very important and should be applied to all professions to ensure best performance at work. Following this set of values is one of the key features that define the professionalism of all chartered and technical surveyors. Every IT professionals must base all actions and judgments on these values.
Act with Integrity
Every IT professional are expected to make decisions and act solely in the public interest, without consideration of their private interests. Integrity can be measured in terms of what is right and just. Integrity also requires employee to maintain perfect standards of professional conduct, make decisions with the public interest in mind, and apply absolute honesty in carrying out their work and in handling the resources (INTOSAI, 1998).
Confidentiality
Employee also needs to keep the appropriate information top-secret. Every employee is prohibiting disclosure of information to anyone inside or outside our firm without the legal or professional right to know (RICS, 2000).
Competence
Every IT professional must understand that the public and our clients believe our work to meet high professional standards. Besides that, IT professional must have appropriate skills and capabilities to every client assignment. This to ensure that customer satisfied with the result that we will show to them (RICS, 2000).
Objectivity
Every IT professional must give professional opinions and advise related to the task given by leader or customer. The opinion must base on the objective of the relevant task assign to them. The employee must not prejudice conflict of interest or undue influence of others to overrule our professional judgments. Other than that, employees must address differences of opinion and handle them constructively and professionally (RICS, 2000).
Professional Behavior
All IT professional must obey with professional standards and appropriate laws and regulations. Besides that, they must avoid any act that may disgrace our professions. The employee must make every effort not only to do what is legal, but also what is right. (RICS, 2000)
Respect and Fair Treatment
All employees or workers must understand the impact that our individual behavior has on our colleagues and society, and always work to take responsible action. Besides that, every employee is encouraged and values the various mix of people, perspectives, talents and experiences. We must treat all our colleagues with esteem, politeness and fairness. (RICS, 2000)
Accountability and Decision-making
Every IT professional must recognize that we are part of models and we set behavioral standards for our profession and each other. We can make decisions based on our shared values and believe our leaders and colleagues to do the same such as integrity, outstanding value to client’s commitment to each other and strength from cultural diversit (RICS, 2000).
Issues regarding Ethics in IT
Lots of issues regarding ethics in IT can be found even when the thoughts of the many say, “what can go wrong with people working with computers?” What can happen to other working environment might and can happen through IT background to.
A website created by ComputerWorld, shows example of a case where an employee is using the company’s internet service to watch porn. Given that by using company’s internet he’s using the company’s IP address, this can lead to the provider, knowing the activity going on inside the company and gives the company a bad name. Below are the lists and explanations about ethical issue within IT world.
Power and responsibilities
As much as the title entitled, power stands for the authority of the personnel, and responsibilities stands for how he use his authority. In a case observed by ComputerWorld (Harbert, 2007), an example written above is one good example of violating the responsibility given to him. Example of power in IT is that, a manager usually has a full database, or the listing of medical leaves available for any of the employee. It would be unethical for the manager to look up personal information of the employee, for own purpose or other unreasonable reason.
Governing/Administrating
In this issue, it always focuses on the manager and the upper card of the organization pyramid. It is common now to see in any company or an organization to put security camera in their working space. It is good in one way, which is to govern the company to find slackers within the company (Harbert, 2007), or in any case like the given example above. To administer the use of internet to catch those who misuse their facilities. In an unethical side, the manager can be using the camera to spy on the female employee. This particular issue validate with privacy issue among professionals, be it in IT or in any other department. And, being discussed about privacy, this can leads to confidentiality issue.
Therefore one might wonder, what is ethics, how to achieve it, and why it is so essential in human life? Ethics can be divided into two distinctions, first as moral code and second as the concept of morality. What is moral code? Moral code can be described as a set of rules and all of these rules will eventually establish boundaries or perception about generally accepted behavior. However, there is no synchronization as well as standardization about this set of rules. This is because each culture and different communities have their own prescribed rules that often, more or less will contradict with other cultures and communities’ set of rules. An example of moral code is to treat others just like how you want to be treated.
Apart from that, ethics can also be viewed as morality, which are the social conventions or agreements regarding right and wrong. The concept of morality is widely shared and acceptable among various people from different walks of life. However, morality may vary or differ from one individual to the other individual based on certain factors or attributes such as age, cultural group, ethnic background, religion, as well as gender. For example, in Islam, it is wrong to gamble but according to other religions, such as Buddhist or Christian, gambling is acceptable and not considered as a sin as long as it does not bring negative outcome to the person and other people around him or her.
According to Oxford Dictionaries, the mere definition of the word ethics is moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity and the second definition is about the branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles. In a layman term, the definition of the term ethics can be stated or justified as a set of beliefs about right and wrong behavior. Whereas, ethical behavior conforms to generally accepted social norms. As an example, in Malaysia, it is considered as an offensive act if individuals are kissing in front of the public however that practice is just view as normal in European countries. Apart from that, ethical behavior can be further extended into three broad yet connected categories. The first one is virtues, which are habits that incline or make people to do what is acceptable such as being silent in the library or queue up and wait for turn while boarding a bus. The second category of ethical behavior is vices, which are habits of unacceptable behavior, for example stealing money from other people and hurting other creatures without any concrete reasons and the last category is value system, a scheme or an outline of moral values, such as the laws and regulations that all citizens in Malaysia must obey and withstand. Furthermore, ethical behavior is always connected to integrity. This is because integrity can be viewed as the cornerstone or foundation of ethical behavior.
According to Longley and Shain (1985), Information Technology (IT) is described as the acquisition, processing, storage, and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual, and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications. During the years 1960s and 1970s, the phrase IT was still unknown to the public and only familiar with individuals that worked in certain places such as banks and hospitals to refer to the processes they used to store information. Nowadays, the term information technology has becomes a household phrase where it has gain lots of tremendous momentums throughout the decades especially since the advancement of computer technology as well as Internet technology. In a layman term, IT can be defined as the use of computers as well as networks to store, process, retrieve, transmit, and protect information.
As the popularity of Internet is vastly increasing decades after decades and years after years, it means that more and more people have become part of the large Internet’s community and all of these individuals are connected to one another through giant, interconnected, and continuously evolving networks of computers, switches, routers, hubs, and other communication devices. Due to the growing popularity of Internet as well as increased personal awareness, more Internets’ users started to acknowledge the concept of ethics in IT including the importance of ethics to the IT professionals. According to Reynolds (2006), there are several degrees of public concern regarding the ethical use of IT. These include e-mail and internet access monitoring, peer-to-peer networks violation of copyright, unsolicited e-mail, hackers and identity theft, plagiarism, and finally cookies and spyware. However, most of the general public still not realized the critical importance of ethics in the IT’s world.
According to Shinder (2005), in actuality no true set of answer has existed to accurately solve ethical dilemmas which exist among IT professionals. This is because professions belonging to IT could be considered to be younger compared to other long established professions such as in business, military and science. Experience in this matter is still lacking. Also, most ethical problems found which are related to the use of such technology could not be solved by the law because these issues have not been integrated to it. However with the advent of numerous international societies and associations dedicated in establishing extensive code of ethics and conduct in IT, these issues are starting to be addressed. Their occurrences are beginning to show sign of gradual decrease, since the rules introduced by such associations as the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), British Computer Society (BCS), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Computer Ethics Institute are started to be adhered by millions of members consisting of computing professionals and users worldwide. This code serves as behavioral template or guideline on which their members could refer to.
The second approach toward solving ethical problems is through an ethics program. According to Herold (2006), ethics program is a form of internal strategy to promote a routine for employees and employers in conducting ethical conduct and emphasize a direction toward the law. It is often exerted in corporate organizations. The program also monitors conducts related to IT, detects and prevents further misconduct by irresponsible individual from being realized within organizations. With it in effect, the damage being done inside and toward another organization would be less disastrous. In addition to Reynolds (2006), if an employee or employer in a company with an ethics program in effect is caught doing an unethical act, he would be sentenced to a lighter punishment than in a company without such initiative. This is seen as another reason why ethics program is usually exerted by most companies. It is intentionally implemented this way, to promote close relationship between companies and the authority to solve or at least reduce the likelihood of ethical problems.
However despite the large role played by the code and ethics program in countering ethical dilemmas over the years, the chance for them to happen is still at large present. This is because unseen loop holes are still present in the information system workplace environment. The system would never be perfect. With weaknesses, opportunities arise. One with the knowledge of using the information system and computing in general could do unpredictable things. Depending on a situation, a person could perform an unethical action whether it is deliberate or unintentional and whether it would benefit the doer in any way or otherwise. Despite the explicit ethics code, according to Shinder (2005), the answer toward whether the action is considered ethical or otherwise is still dependent on each IT professional's opinion. Due to that, there is a need to make the ethical standards become stronger and deploy in a more effective manner. Penalties are often imposed on their members who refuse to obey or breach this code by the aforementioned associations and societies, although they are seen as lenient compared to other form of crimes.
Ethics are very important and should be applied to all professions to ensure best performance at work. Following this set of values is one of the key features that define the professionalism of all chartered and technical surveyors. Every IT professionals must base all actions and judgments on these values.
Act with Integrity
Every IT professional are expected to make decisions and act solely in the public interest, without consideration of their private interests. Integrity can be measured in terms of what is right and just. Integrity also requires employee to maintain perfect standards of professional conduct, make decisions with the public interest in mind, and apply absolute honesty in carrying out their work and in handling the resources (INTOSAI, 1998).
Confidentiality
Employee also needs to keep the appropriate information top-secret. Every employee is prohibiting disclosure of information to anyone inside or outside our firm without the legal or professional right to know (RICS, 2000).
Competence
Every IT professional must understand that the public and our clients believe our work to meet high professional standards. Besides that, IT professional must have appropriate skills and capabilities to every client assignment. This to ensure that customer satisfied with the result that we will show to them (RICS, 2000).
Objectivity
Every IT professional must give professional opinions and advise related to the task given by leader or customer. The opinion must base on the objective of the relevant task assign to them. The employee must not prejudice conflict of interest or undue influence of others to overrule our professional judgments. Other than that, employees must address differences of opinion and handle them constructively and professionally (RICS, 2000).
Professional Behavior
All IT professional must obey with professional standards and appropriate laws and regulations. Besides that, they must avoid any act that may disgrace our professions. The employee must make every effort not only to do what is legal, but also what is right. (RICS, 2000)
Respect and Fair Treatment
All employees or workers must understand the impact that our individual behavior has on our colleagues and society, and always work to take responsible action. Besides that, every employee is encouraged and values the various mix of people, perspectives, talents and experiences. We must treat all our colleagues with esteem, politeness and fairness. (RICS, 2000)
Accountability and Decision-making
Every IT professional must recognize that we are part of models and we set behavioral standards for our profession and each other. We can make decisions based on our shared values and believe our leaders and colleagues to do the same such as integrity, outstanding value to client’s commitment to each other and strength from cultural diversit (RICS, 2000).
Issues regarding Ethics in IT
Lots of issues regarding ethics in IT can be found even when the thoughts of the many say, “what can go wrong with people working with computers?” What can happen to other working environment might and can happen through IT background to.
A website created by ComputerWorld, shows example of a case where an employee is using the company’s internet service to watch porn. Given that by using company’s internet he’s using the company’s IP address, this can lead to the provider, knowing the activity going on inside the company and gives the company a bad name. Below are the lists and explanations about ethical issue within IT world.
Power and responsibilities
As much as the title entitled, power stands for the authority of the personnel, and responsibilities stands for how he use his authority. In a case observed by ComputerWorld (Harbert, 2007), an example written above is one good example of violating the responsibility given to him. Example of power in IT is that, a manager usually has a full database, or the listing of medical leaves available for any of the employee. It would be unethical for the manager to look up personal information of the employee, for own purpose or other unreasonable reason.
Governing/Administrating
In this issue, it always focuses on the manager and the upper card of the organization pyramid. It is common now to see in any company or an organization to put security camera in their working space. It is good in one way, which is to govern the company to find slackers within the company (Harbert, 2007), or in any case like the given example above. To administer the use of internet to catch those who misuse their facilities. In an unethical side, the manager can be using the camera to spy on the female employee. This particular issue validate with privacy issue among professionals, be it in IT or in any other department. And, being discussed about privacy, this can leads to confidentiality issue.
Therefore one might wonder, what is ethics, how to achieve it, and why it is so essential in human life? Ethics can be divided into two distinctions, first as moral code and second as the concept of morality. What is moral code? Moral code can be described as a set of rules and all of these rules will eventually establish boundaries or perception about generally accepted behavior. However, there is no synchronization as well as standardization about this set of rules. This is because each culture and different communities have their own prescribed rules that often, more or less will contradict with other cultures and communities’ set of rules. An example of moral code is to treat others just like how you want to be treated.
Apart from that, ethics can also be viewed as morality, which are the social conventions or agreements regarding right and wrong. The concept of morality is widely shared and acceptable among various people from different walks of life. However, morality may vary or differ from one individual to the other individual based on certain factors or attributes such as age, cultural group, ethnic background, religion, as well as gender. For example, in Islam, it is wrong to gamble but according to other religions, such as Buddhist or Christian, gambling is acceptable and not considered as a sin as long as it does not bring negative outcome to the person and other people around him or her.
According to Oxford Dictionaries, the mere definition of the word ethics is moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity and the second definition is about the branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles. In a layman term, the definition of the term ethics can be stated or justified as a set of beliefs about right and wrong behavior. Whereas, ethical behavior conforms to generally accepted social norms. As an example, in Malaysia, it is considered as an offensive act if individuals are kissing in front of the public however that practice is just view as normal in European countries. Apart from that, ethical behavior can be further extended into three broad yet connected categories. The first one is virtues, which are habits that incline or make people to do what is acceptable such as being silent in the library or queue up and wait for turn while boarding a bus. The second category of ethical behavior is vices, which are habits of unacceptable behavior, for example stealing money from other people and hurting other creatures without any concrete reasons and the last category is value system, a scheme or an outline of moral values, such as the laws and regulations that all citizens in Malaysia must obey and withstand. Furthermore, ethical behavior is always connected to integrity. This is because integrity can be viewed as the cornerstone or foundation of ethical behavior.
According to Longley and Shain (1985), Information Technology (IT) is described as the acquisition, processing, storage, and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual, and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications. During the years 1960s and 1970s, the phrase IT was still unknown to the public and only familiar with individuals that worked in certain places such as banks and hospitals to refer to the processes they used to store information. Nowadays, the term information technology has becomes a household phrase where it has gain lots of tremendous momentums throughout the decades especially since the advancement of computer technology as well as Internet technology. In a layman term, IT can be defined as the use of computers as well as networks to store, process, retrieve, transmit, and protect information.
As the popularity of Internet is vastly increasing decades after decades and years after years, it means that more and more people have become part of the large Internet’s community and all of these individuals are connected to one another through giant, interconnected, and continuously evolving networks of computers, switches, routers, hubs, and other communication devices. Due to the growing popularity of Internet as well as increased personal awareness, more Internets’ users started to acknowledge the concept of ethics in IT including the importance of ethics to the IT professionals. According to Reynolds (2006), there are several degrees of public concern regarding the ethical use of IT. These include e-mail and internet access monitoring, peer-to-peer networks violation of copyright, unsolicited e-mail, hackers and identity theft, plagiarism, and finally cookies and spyware. However, most of the general public still not realized the critical importance of ethics in the IT’s world.
According to Shinder (2005), in actuality no true set of answer has existed to accurately solve ethical dilemmas which exist among IT professionals. This is because professions belonging to IT could be considered to be younger compared to other long established professions such as in business, military and science. Experience in this matter is still lacking. Also, most ethical problems found which are related to the use of such technology could not be solved by the law because these issues have not been integrated to it. However with the advent of numerous international societies and associations dedicated in establishing extensive code of ethics and conduct in IT, these issues are starting to be addressed. Their occurrences are beginning to show sign of gradual decrease, since the rules introduced by such associations as the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), British Computer Society (BCS), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Computer Ethics Institute are started to be adhered by millions of members consisting of computing professionals and users worldwide. This code serves as behavioral template or guideline on which their members could refer to.
The second approach toward solving ethical problems is through an ethics program. According to Herold (2006), ethics program is a form of internal strategy to promote a routine for employees and employers in conducting ethical conduct and emphasize a direction toward the law. It is often exerted in corporate organizations. The program also monitors conducts related to IT, detects and prevents further misconduct by irresponsible individual from being realized within organizations. With it in effect, the damage being done inside and toward another organization would be less disastrous. In addition to Reynolds (2006), if an employee or employer in a company with an ethics program in effect is caught doing an unethical act, he would be sentenced to a lighter punishment than in a company without such initiative. This is seen as another reason why ethics program is usually exerted by most companies. It is intentionally implemented this way, to promote close relationship between companies and the authority to solve or at least reduce the likelihood of ethical problems.
However despite the large role played by the code and ethics program in countering ethical dilemmas over the years, the chance for them to happen is still at large present. This is because unseen loop holes are still present in the information system workplace environment. The system would never be perfect. With weaknesses, opportunities arise. One with the knowledge of using the information system and computing in general could do unpredictable things. Depending on a situation, a person could perform an unethical action whether it is deliberate or unintentional and whether it would benefit the doer in any way or otherwise. Despite the explicit ethics code, according to Shinder (2005), the answer toward whether the action is considered ethical or otherwise is still dependent on each IT professional's opinion. Due to that, there is a need to make the ethical standards become stronger and deploy in a more effective manner. Penalties are often imposed on their members who refuse to obey or breach this code by the aforementioned associations and societies, although they are seen as lenient compared to other form of crimes.
References
- Harbert, Tam, 2007. Ethics in IT: Dark secrets, ugly truths -- and little guidance. [online] Available at: <http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/304308/Ethics_in_IT_Dark_secrets_ugly_truths_and_little_guidance> [Accessed 23 October 2011].
- Herold, Rebecca, 2006. Introduction to Computer Ethics [online] Available at: < http://www.infosectoday.com/Articles/Intro_Computer_Ethics.htm> [Accessed 21st October 2011].
- INTOSAI, 1998. Code of Ethics And Auditing Standards. [online] Available at: <http://www.intosai.org/blueline/upload/1codethaudstande.pdf> [Accessed 22 October 2011].
- Longley, Dennis; Shain, Michael (1985), Dictionary of Information Technology (2 ed.), Macmillan Press, p. 164, ISBN 0-333-37260-3 [Accessed 20th October 2011].
- Oxford University Press, 2011. Definition of ethics [online] Available at: <http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ethics> [Accessed 26th October 2011].
- Reynolds, George, 2006. Ethics in Information Technology (2nd Edition) Course Technology [online] Available at: <http://www.auburn.edu/~fordfn1/ethic01.ppt> [Accessed 22nd October 2011].
- RICS, 2000. Professional Ethics Guidance Note: Part 1introduction. [online] Available at: <http://www.joinricsineurope.eu/uploads/files/Ethics%20part%201.pdf > [Accessed 22 October 2011].
- Shinder, Deb, 2005. Ethical Issues for IT Security Professionals [online] Available at: <http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Ethical-Issues-IT-Security-Professionals.html> [Accessed 22nd October 2011].
Posted in: Part 1
0 comments:
Post a Comment