This edition of ETHIcol focuses on the 2010 Report of the ETHICOMP Survey of Professional Practice which is now available from IMIS. Data was collected during 2009 and subsequently verified and analysed in 2010. It reports the attitudes of Information Systems (IS) professionals and entrant IS professionals to a variety of ethical issues.

This is the sixth report in the series which began in 1998 and there has been an increase in the overall number of respondents to 329 in total, representing a range of age, experience, type of employing organisation and country of employment. For some issues, these factors appear to have some influence on respondents’ attitudes.

Here are some highlights from the report.

The tendency perceived in earlier surveys for younger, less experienced respondents to show less ethical awareness in some areas than their more experienced colleagues, is confirmed. There are differences in response between respondents working for some types of employing organisations and in certain geographical areas.

There remain a number of areas where more discussion during the education and preparation for professional practice is required, and where more guidance and support for individuals in the workplace is desirable to encourage consistently responsible behaviour.

From the responses to the survey, a picture emerges of young professionals who care about the overall objectives or purpose of the projects they work on, but who may not have the freedom to refuse to work on any that they consider to be unethical. The more mature professional in senior management posts is more able to be more discriminating about his or her work.

The vast majority of self-employed or public service workers are most likely to disagree about employees being able to re-create intellectual property for an employer other than the one who originally paid for it. There is still a slight majority of respondents from private enterprise who disagree, but the figures are smaller. However, when it comes to respondents working for academic organisations, attitudes are evenly split between disagreement and agreement.

Respondents working for private enterprise of all types, and in public service, are fairly evenly split on the acceptability of using their employer’s computing facilities for non-profit use, whereas among those working for academic institutions the level of agreement is much higher. This may be because of the difference in work environments with academia blurring the boundary between work and home more than in other organisations.

There is some variation between different countries to the statement, ‘The licensing of computer professionals should be introduced into my country’. The highest level of support comes from African respondents. The lowest level of support for licensing is found among respondents from the USA, with UK respondents falling between them and the rest of Europe/Australia.

The report concludes with a series of recommendations to organisations and professional societies. It is concerning that several of these have appeared in previous reports suggesting that in some areas change of attitudes and improvement in practice are long overdue.

In the report organisations are recommended to:

• seriously consider adopting a Code of Conduct for all employees;
• increase efforts to promote awareness among all employees of:
• • ethical issues
  • the organization’s Code of Conduct
  • how the organization’s Code of Conduct may be applied to guide ethical decision-making;
• establish ‘whistle-blowing’ procedures to encourage employees who become aware of unethical practices within the organization to come forward;
• introduce a clear policy concerning the use of computing resources by employees for their own activities, and consider allowing the use for selected non-profit-making activities as a contribution to the local community or as a legitimate perk for employees;
• establish clear guidelines for the introduction and operation of any electronic surveillance process, including email and internet usage monitoring, ensuring that all employees are fully consulted and that their rights to privacy in the workplace are respected;
• review on a regular basis the security of computer-held data with attention to both technical aspects and management aspects affecting potential threats;
• consider and clarify their policy concerning the re-creation of intellectual property such as a product, program or design by employees when they move to another employer;
• ensure that all policies are clearly communicated to employees, in particular to student and new graduate employees, and are deployed throughout the organization;
• promote an approach to systems development that encourages genuine stakeholder involvement in decision-making;
• improve the promotion of data protection awareness among staff and review the means by which compliance with data privacy and data protection requirements are assured;
• make greater efforts to provide a working environment that encourages ethical practices, supporting employees in resisting the temptation to allow commercial pressures to lead to ethically dubious practices - instead, promoting their ethical stance to their commercial advantage.

In the report professional societies representing the IS profession are recommended to:

• ensure that their Code of Conduct remains up-to-date and relevant to the profession, increasing efforts to promote awareness of the Code among members and providing guidance how it can be applied in practice;
• provide a greater degree of particular support for their younger members, helping them to acquire greater awareness of the ethical issues they will encounter throughout their careers;
• promote debate of the continuing applicability of legislation such as the software licensing laws, in the light of current developments, opinion and practice;
• promote debate concerning the desirability of licensing for information systems professionals;
• promote members’ awareness of the role that IS staff play in the designing of data privacy and data protection compliance into information systems.

Contact IMIS for a full copy of the 2010 report.

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