Question

Provide two examples of common service analytics problems the can occur in business organizations. Discuss the ethical issues that must be considered by IT professionals in addressing these problems and specific steps IT professionals can take to ensure that ethical standards are being upheld when problem resolutions are selected.

Answer 1

Answer:-

Poor Data Quality

While we are accustomed to thinking about quality in the context of physical objects or products, it turns out data quality is a material issue for every firm all of the time. Data stored in structured databases or repositories is often incomplete, inconsistent or out-of-date. It is likely you have been on the receiving end of a simple example of a data quality issue.

Most of us can recall receiving duplicate mailings from marketers addressed to slightly different or radically different versions of our actual name. The marketer's database contains duplicate records with our address and different, often erroneous spellings or variations of our name. We recycle the duplicate mail as junk, and the marketer incurs excess costs in the form of printing and mailing all due to a simple data quality issue. Amplify this mistake by many hundreds or thousands of records and this small data quality error turns costly.

The issue of data quality grows in importance as we strive to make decisions on strategies, markets, and marketing in near real time. While software and solutions exist to help monitor and improve the quality of structured (formatted) data, the real solution is a significant, organization-wide commitment to treating data as a valuable asset. In practice, this is difficult to achieve and requires extraordinary discipline and leadership support.

Drowning in Data

Data is everywhere in an organization. Consider customer data. Most organizations have become skilled at capturing information about customers and prospects.

• Marketing collects data from people who attend live or web events or who download content.
• Executives use data to support or define new strategies.
• Sales collect data about customers involved in the sales process.
• Customer Support captures information about calls and chats.
• Management teams draw upon data and key metrics for scorecards.
• Customer data is used in accounting for billing purposes and by quality and customer insight teams for monitoring customer satisfaction.

We capture customer information in a variety of different software systems, and we store the data in a variety of data repositories. One Global Fortune 100 firm recognized as much as 10-percent of their customer data was held locally by employees on their computers in spreadsheets. Another organization regularly polls their sales representatives for business card data before running marketing campaigns.

Much like the ocean-going sailor stranded in a lifeboat after his ship sunk, there's water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. We have the same phenomenon in our businesses. Data is everywhere, and increasingly data is available from social and search feeds in real time. If the data is not easily accessible or, if we have duplicate or incomplete data, we are unable to leverage it for its intended purpose.

Increasingly organizations are integrating their disparate software applications and simplifying the process of collecting and aggregating data across the enterprise. Along with data quality, however, this effort is expensive, time-consuming and it never ends.

Growing Data Volumes

We are making more and more data at a pace that is difficult to comprehend. Experts suggest that every two years (and shrinking) we are creating more data than existed on the planet earth for all of civilization.

Most of this new data is unstructured, versus that type of data that is neatly entered into our software and database applications. For example, all of the tweets about your product or brand represent a potential treasure trove of insights, yet this data is unstructured, increasing the complexity of capturing and analyzing it. While there are many software offerings to help with this challenge, the unstructured data represents a new torrent of raw material for processing, with all of the inherent complexity

Discuss the ethical issues that must be considered by IT professionals in addressing these problems

• Should you read the private e-mail of your network users just because you can? Is it OK to read employees' e-mail as a security measure to ensure that sensitive company information isn't being disclosed? Is it OK to read employees' e-mail to ensure that company rules (for instance, against personal use of the e-mail system) aren't being violated? If you do read employees' e-mail, should you disclose that policy to them? Before or after the fact?

• Is it OK to monitor the Web sites visited by your network users? Should you routinely keep logs of visited sites? Is it negligent to not monitor such Internet usage, to prevent the possibility of pornography in the workplace that could create a hostile work environment?
• Is it OK to place key loggers on machines on the network to capture everything the user types? What about screen capture programs so you can see everything that's displayed? Should users be informed that they're being watched in this way?
• Is it OK to read the documents and look at the graphics files that are stored on users' computers or in their directories on the file server?

Remember that we're not talking about legal questions here. A company may very well have the legal right to monitor everything an employee does with its computer equipment. We're talking about the ethical aspects of having the ability to do so.

As a network administrator or security professional, you have rights and privileges that allow you to access most of the data on the systems on your network.

You may even be able to access encrypted data if you have access to the recovery agent account. What you do with those abilities depends in part on your particular job duties (for example, if monitoring employee mail is a part of your official job description) and in part on your personal ethical beliefs about these issues.

The slippery slope

A common concept in any ethics discussion is the "slippery slope." This pertains to the ease with which a person can go from doing something that doesn't really seem unethical, such as scanning employees' e-mail "just for fun," to doing things that are increasingly unethical, such as making little changes in their mail messages or diverting messages to the wrong recipient.

In looking at the list of privacy issues above, it's easy to justify each of the actions described. But it's also easy to see how each of those actions could "morph" into much less justifiable actions. For example, the information you gained from reading someone's e-mail could be used to embarrass that person, to gain a political advantage within the company, to get him/her disciplined or fired, or even for blackmail.

The slippery slope concept can also go beyond using your IT skills. If it's OK to read other employees' e-mail, is it also OK to go through their desk drawers when they aren't there? To open their briefcases or purses?

Real world ethical dilemmas

What if your perusal of random documents reveals company trade secrets? What if you later leave the company and go to work for a competitor? Is it wrong to use that knowledge in your new job? Would it be "more wrong" if you printed out those documents and took them with you, than if you just relied on your memory?

What if the documents you read showed that the company was violating government regulations or laws? Do you have a moral obligation to turn them in, or are you ethically bound to respect your employer's privacy? Would it make a difference if you signed a nondisclosure agreement when you accepted the job?

IT and security consultants who do work for multiple companies have even more ethical issues to deal with. If you learn things about one of your clients that might affect your other client(s), where does your loyalty lie?

Then there are money issues. The proliferation of network attacks, hacks, viruses and other threats to their IT infrastructures have caused many companies to "be afraid, be very afraid." As a security consultant, it may be very easy to play on that fear to convince companies to spend far more money than they really need to. Is it wrong for you to charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars per hour for your services, or is it a case of "whatever the market will bear?"

Is it wrong for you to mark up the equipment and software that you get for the customer when you pass the cost through? What about kickbacks from equipment manufacturers? Is it wrong to accept "commissions" from them for persuading your clients to go with their products? Or what if the connection is more subtle? Is it wrong to steer your clients toward the products of companies in which you hold stock?

Another ethical issue involves promising more than you can deliver, or manipulating data to obtain higher fees. You can install technologies and configure settings to make a client's network more secure, but you can never make it completely secure. Is it wrong to talk a client into replacing their current firewalls with those of a different manufacturer, or switching to an open source operating system – which changes, coincidentally, will result in many more billable hours for you – on the premise that this is the answer to their security problems?

Here's another scenario: What if a client asks you to save money by cutting out some of the security measures that you recommended, yet your analysis of the client's security needs shows that sensitive information will be at risk if you do so? You try to explain this to the client, but he/she is adamant. Should you go ahead and configure the network in a less secure manner? Should you "eat" the cost and install the extra security measures at no cost to the client? Should you refuse to do the job? Would it make a difference if the client's business were in a regulated industry, and implementing the lower security standards would constitute a violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act, Sarbanes-Oxley or other laws?