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Better ethics can help IT professionals deliver more effective products and services according to a De Montfort University computer expert (DMU).
Professor Simon Rogerson will call on IT professionals to give greater emphasis to ethical issues at an international conference in Hong Kong next week.
Professor Rogerson, who is Europe's first professor of computer ethics, will deliver a keynote speech at the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers' first Annual Conference on IT Professional Practice, which is being held on Thursday 4 May.
Entitled 'Ethical Practice: the Prerequisite for Acceptable ICT Systems', the speech will discuss how current methods of developing and delivering ICT products and services can be improved through the use of ethical theory.
Drawing upon the work of other eminent computer ethics experts, Professor Rogerson will suggest that too much is left to chance in the development of ICT and that the explicit use of ethics can increase the probability of acceptable systems being delivered by design rather than by luck.
Professor Rogerson said: "The development and application of Information and Communication Technologies have been and continue to be associated with failure, poor quality, over spends and so on.
"It seems the current process of delivering ICT products and services leaves too much to chance."
He added: "Whilst regulation and the law might act as a safeguard it is people's willingness and desire to use IT sensitively that really matters.
"Unfortunately few organisations adequately take these considerations into account and consequently it is simply by chance that implemented systems turn out to be ethical and socially acceptable or not.
"The line must be drawn. The time has now come for those responsible for IT development and application to give equal regard to the ethical and societal issues of their work as they do to the technological and economic ones."
Professor Rogerson is the Director of DMU's Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility (CCSR) within the Faculty of Computing Sciences and Engineering.
ENDS