Objective Ethics for Managing InformationTechnology

INTRODUCTION Businessmen have faced ethical dilemmas throughout history in many varying contexts. Today, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and information technology (IT) managers, in particular, face many ethical dilemmas from not only traditional business dilemmas, but also in managing IT. Traditional ethical issues of business, such as receiving gifts and promotional items from vendors, affect any manager in charge of purchases. In addition, IT managers must also make decisions with regards to technological issues such as information privacy, security, and accountability. IT facilitates action, both good and bad. This means that individuals can act good with far more efficiency and act bad with more malevolence. Actions that may not have been possible without IT now become issues because people have the means to do them. Managers need to not only adopt a moral code for themselves, but to encourage their employees to adopt a moral code or guard against and appropriately deal with behavior that violates that code. Identifying and understanding an objective ethical framework is critical for the rapidly changing nature of information technology. Without an appropriate ethical standard to guide choices and actions in ever-more complex and subtle situations, IT managers and professionals will find choosing morally acceptable solutions ever more difficult, leading to dangers in the long-term success of the organization. CIOs need to cut through the haze of conflicting demands to make decisions for the benefit of the organization. CIOs also need to be confident that their employees will act in appropriate, non-arbitrary manners when making decisions. The need to research ethics with regard to IT has been demonstrated numerous times Stewart & Segars, 2002), yet none have provided an objective standard for making decisions. While several research efforts have explored normative and applied ethical theories as applied to questioned the underlying assumptions nor have they provided a compelling case for a non-3 arbitrary, objective moral code. Reviewing existing ethical theories should lead us to a standard that is applicable and beneficial to IT managers. BACKGROUND Ethics is the study of morals and moral choices. It is the study of individual purposes and values which guide their life. Ethics examines which values and virtues are necessary versus which are optional and defines the ultimate source of values. In an increasingly complex world, these guiding principles direct how we should live by providing a moral code – " a code of values to guide man's choices and actions …