Information Systems Implementation Consequences: Ethical Treatment of End Users

For decades, end users have been studied from a multitude of aspects, attitudes, and perspectives in an attempt to better understand end-user resistance to new technology and to find ways to increase the likelihood of implementation success. Similarly, ethical considerations surrounding the use of information technology has been a vibrant topic for some time, along with well-established work in the general field of ethics. However, there has been little work linking these important elements together in an effort to provide corporate leadership and implementation teams with tools to help them determine how their ethical decisions might affect end-users. This research in progress proposes a validation of the imperative to incorporate ethical elements into the decision-making necessary for the implementation process by focusing on the concept of harm. Using the explicit motivation to do no harm and drawing on prior work measuring end-user satisfaction and similar tools, an Ethical Treatment Index is proposed as an instrument to empirically measure end-user harm or the lack thereof as it relates to information systems implementations.