Chapter 3 : Management Information Systems : Managing the Digital Firm
Hi ! Welcome to my blog. After long semester break, I studied Management Information System throughout this semester so here I am going to share what I have learned for this chapter is Managing the Digital Firm. This article will help you to understand how well-known companies use IT to solve problems and achieve business objectives. Managing The Digital Firm provides the most comprehensive overview of information systems used by business firms today.
CONTENTS
1. What Ethical, Social, And Political Issues Are Raised by Information Systems?
2. A Model For Thinking About Ethical, Social and Political Issues
3. Five Moral Dimensions of the Information Age
4. Four Key Technology Trends Have Heightened The Ethical Stresses On Existing Social Arrangements And Laws
5. Ethics In A Information Society
6. Analyzing ethical issues
7. Applying Ethical Principles
8. Conclusion
1) What Ethical, Social, and Political Issues are raised by Information Systems?
- Record cases of failed ethical judgement in business.
- Wells Fargo, Deerfield Management, General Motors, Takata Corporation.
- In many, information systems used to bury decisons from public scrutiny.
- Ethics
- Principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free moral agents, use to make schoices to guide their behaviors.
- Information systems raise new ethical questions because they create opportunities for :
- intense social change, threatening existing distributions of power, money, rights, and obligations.
- New opportunities for crime
- New kinds of crimes
2) A Model for Thinking About Ethical, Social and Political Issues
- Society as a calm pond
- IT as rock dropped in pond, creating ripples of new situations not covered by old rules
- Social and political institutions cannot respond overnight to these ripples-it may take years to develop etiquette, expectations, laws.
- Requires understanding of ethics to make choices in legally gray areas.
Figure 4.1 The Relationship Between Ethical, Social and Political Issues in an Information Society
3) Five Moral Dimensions of the Information Age
- Information rights and obligations
- Property rights and obligations
- Accountability and control
- System quality
- Quality of life
4) Four key technology trends have heightened the ethical stresses on existing social arrangements and laws.
- Computing power has doubled every 18 months allowing growing numbers of organizations to use information systems in their core business processes. This growing dependence on critical systems increases vulnerability to system errors and poor data quality.
- Advances in data storage techniques have enabled for the multiplying databases in individuals maintained by private and public organizations - making the violation of individual privacy both cheap and effective.
- Advances in data analysis techniques enable companies and government agencies use profiling to determine detailed information about individual's habits and tastes and create dossiers of detailed information. Nonobvious relationship awareness (NORA) is a new data analysis technology that can take data about people from many sources and correlate relationships to find hidden connections to identify potential criminals and terrorists.
- Advances in networking reduce the costs of moving and accessing data, permitting privacy invasions on a vast scale.
5) Ethics in a Information Society
What are the main features of ethical choice?
a) Responsibility: Accepting the potential costs, duties and obligations of one's decisions accountability.
b) Accountability : A feature of systems and social institutions, accountability means that mechanisms are in place to determine who took responsible action and who is responsible for a action.
c) Liability : Refers to the existence of laws that permit individuals to recover the damages done to them by other actors, systems, or organizations.
Due process : Laws are well-known and understood, with an ability to appeal to higher authorities.
6) Analyzing ethical issues
A five steps process in suggested :
1) Identifying the facts
2) Defining the conflict or problems and identify and higher-order values involved
3) Identifying the stakeholders
4) Identifying options that can be taken
5) Identifying potential consequences of action
7) Applying ethical principles
7) Applying ethical principles
- Groups of professionals, such as American Medical Association take on special rights and obligations because of their claims to knowledge and wisdom. Professional codes of conduct are promulgated by associations of professionals to take responsibility for the partial regulation of their professions.
- Ethical dilemmas are created when one set of interests is pitted against another, for example when the rights of a company to prevent its workforce from wasting company resources are pitted against the rights of employees to privacy.
8) Conclusion
Information technology is introducing changes for which laws and rules of acceptable conduct have not yet been developed, increasing computing power, storage and networking capabilities- including the internet-expand the reach of individual and organizational actions and magnify their impacts.
