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Ethics survey: haste sours quality in ICT

Richard Lucas, Information Age

17/06/2007 12:22:16

One of the themes in these articles on ethical matters has been about behaving as a professional in the ICT industry. Previous articles have discussed aspects such as the relationship between quality management and ethics, and the role of the ACS code of ethics in supporting the ICT professional.

In this article we continue with this theme of professionalism, by considering some of the results of a recent online survey of people working in the ICT industry in Australia.

The survey was part of a project being run by the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), and funded by the ACS and the Australian Research Council. The survey included over thirty questions in all, but in particular it asked ICT professionals about their attitudes to ethics. There were 351 respondents, a sample which is considered to be statistically reliable.

One question was "What are the most important ethical issues facing the ICT industry?" The respondents were given a list of issues, and then asked to nominate those that they considered to be the most important, in their experience.

Here are the results for that question.

Ethical issues facing the ICT industry Percentage of cases Compromising quality to meet deadlines 54.9 Unprofessional behaviour 49.7 Privacy 45.7 False promises 44.8 Conflict of interest 42.2 Copyright 31.9 Compromising user requirements to meet deadlines 29.9 Compromising functionality to meet deadlines 29.6 Piracy 26.7 Viruses/Worms and other related malware 26.1 Spam 23.0 Identity theft 21.0 Surveillance 17.8 Phishing 15.2 Computer fraud 14.9 Other 9.5 Average number of problems selected per person 4.79

The issues listed fall into two broad categories: (a) those related to how professionals and other workers in the industry behave; and (b) those related to the products of that work, and which usually also involve people not in the ICT industry, in some way.

The survey does not tell us how often these problems occur, but we could assume that they do happen regularly. If they did not, we would expect the responses to focus on some of the other issues listed, such as Spam or Identity Theft.

The table shows that the top issue is about the behaviour of professionals in the industry; more than half of the people responding to the survey said that compromising quality to meet deadlines was the biggest problem.

Looking further down the list we see that seven of the top eight ethical problems have something to do with the everyday work of people in the industry. The eighth problem, Privacy, is a broad topic of course, but many of the aspects of the "Privacy issue" relate to information systems which handle personal information, and which have been developed by ICT professionals.

Indeed, this point generally applies to all of the category b) ethical issues listed in the table. These issues all include systems developed by ICT professionals.

The demographic data of the respondents shows that over 50 per cent of them said they were either a manager, consultant or administrator; another 20 per cent were developers; and the remainder specified a job category such as technical support, academic, programmer, etc. Respondents were fairly evenly spread between the public and private sectors.

The problem of "compromising quality to meet deadlines" suggests that, to meet the deadline, things that should have been done were not, and perhaps other things were done which should not have been. In fact, all of the ethical problems shown in category a) above would arise from this type of behaviour, which would include practices such as not estimating and planning properly, not conducting reviews, and doing things like stretching the truth in progress reports.

These work activities fall into the realm of business systems, covering areas such as financial management, quality management, OH&S, product management, and risk management. Dr Deming, the international quality management consultant, believed that at least 85 per cent of quality problems in a product or a process are due to the systems and processes within which people work, and these systems are the responsibility of management, not of the people actually doing the work.

This management responsibility includes ensuring that business systems are in place, adequate resources and training are provided to operate and maintain them, and there are regular reviews to identify and fix system problems and to make improvements.

About half of the survey respondents have management responsibilities. So we seem to have a situation where many of these respondents are reporting problems which they should know were happening, and over which they have control. Why should this be, and what does it say about the state of professionalism within the ICT industry?

Perhaps it is because there is a lack of understanding about what it means to be a professional, by those who ask others to compromise quality, for example, or by those who turn a blind eye to these types of unethical practices.

Another statistic from the survey is that over 40 per cent of respondents knew about the ACS code of ethics, but we do not know how far this knowledge goes, or how many of them were ACS members. Actually ACS membership is not really relevant for this argument, because all of the respondents would consider themselves to be professionals. Well, they are not going to say, "Oh yes, I run a large ICT department in the finance industry, but I'm not a professional", are they?

Now, if this lack of understanding of what it is to be a professional is true, what can be done about it? One solution may be to provide more education and training about matters ethical, but more research is needed to confirm whether ethical education for ICT professionals really does make any difference. On the other hand, there is plenty of information available showing that implementing appropriate business systems in an organisation helps it to improve its business performance and customer base.

To summarise, the survey respondents know, by keeping their eyes and ears open, that ethical problems come up and that the most frequent ones are to do with the work done by professionals and other workers in the ICT industry.

Some of these professionals recognise when they are being asked to do something wrong, but are uncertain about what to do about it. Other professionals are managers, and they do not seem to realise that they are part of the solution to unethical behaviour in the workplace, by ensuring that quality and other business systems and methods are in place and followed at all times, not just when things are going well.