Tuesday, 25th September 2018 Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems and Information System, Organisation and Strategy

Tuesday, 25th September 2018

Hi guys! back again with me where this is the 4th week of MIS lecture session :D

Today we studied about Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems.

First of all, Ethics are the principles of right and wrong individuals, acting as free moral agents, use to make choices to guide their behavior. Information systems raise new ethical questions for both individuals and societies because they create opportunities for intense social change. Ethical, social, and political issues are closely linked. Introduction of new technology has a ripple effect in the current equilibrium, creating new ethical, social, and political issues that must be dealt with on individual, social, and political levels. Both social and political institutions require time before developing new behaviours, rules, and laws.

This figure is THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ETHICAL, SOCIAL, AND POLITICAL ISSUES IN AN INFORMATION SOCIETY

The introduction of new information technology has a ripple effect, raising new ethical, social, and political issues that must be dealt with on the individual, social, and political levels. These issues have five moral dimensions: information rights and obligations, property rights and obligations, system quality, quality of life, and accountability and control.

There are five main moral dimensions that tie together ethical, social, and political issues in an information society. These moral dimensions are:

1. Information rights and obligations
   
2. Property rights and obligations
   
3. Accountability and control
   
4. System quality
   
5. Quality of life
   

Four key technology trends have heightened the ethical stresses on existing social arrangements and laws.

1. 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.

2. Advances in data storage techniques have enabled for the multiplying databases on individuals maintained by private and public organizations - making the violation of individual privacyboth cheap and effective.

3. 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.

There are many the guidance related to this ethical and social issue:

¨Do unto others as you would have them do unto you (GoldenRule)

¨If an action is not right for everyone to take, it is not right for anyone (Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative)

¨If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, it is not right to take at all (Descartes’ rule of change)

¨Take the action that achieves the higher or greater value (Utilitarian Principle)

¨Take the action that produces the least harm or the least potential cost (Risk Aversion Principle) Assume that virtually all tangible and intangible objects are owned by someone else unless there is a specific declaration otherwise. ( no free lunch)

The privacy in Internet age

Internet technology has posed new challenges for the protection of individual privacy. Information sent over this vast network of networks may pass through many different computer systems before it reaches its final destination. Each of these systems is capable of monitoring, capturing, and storing communications that pass through it.

Cookies are small text files deposited on a computer hard drive when a user visits to the web sites. Cookies identify the visitor’s web browser software and track visits to the website. Web beacons, also called web bugs, are tiny objects invisibly embedded in e-mail messages and Web pages that are designed to monitor the behavior of the user visiting a web site or sending e-mail. Spyware can secretly install itself on an Internet user’s computer by piggybacking on larger applications. Once installed, the spyware calls out to Web sites to send banner ads and other unsolicited material to the user, and it can also report the user’s movements on the Internet to other computers.

Property Rights: Intellectual Property

Intellectual property is considered to be intangible property created by individuals or corporations. Information technology has made it difficult to protect intellectual property because computerized information can be so easily copied or distributed on networks. Intellectual property is subject to a variety of protections under three different legal traditions: trade secrets, copyright, and patent law.

Trade Secrets

Any intellectual work product – a formula, device, pattern, or compilation of data-used for a business purpose can be classified as a trade secret, provided it is not based on information in the public domain. 

Copyright

Copyright is a statutory grant that protects creators of intellectual property from having their work copied by others for any purpose during the life of the author plus an additional 70 years after the author’s death.

 

Patents
A patent grants the owner an exclusive monopoly on the ideas behind an invention for 20 years. The congressional intent behind patent law was to ensure that inventors of new machines, devices, or methods receive the full financial and other rewards of their labor and yet make widespread use of the invention possible by providing detailed diagrams for those wishing to use the idea under license from the patent’s owner.

System Quality: Data Quality and System Errors

Three principle sources of poor system performance are (1) software bugs and errors (2) hardware or facility failures caused by natural or other causes and (3) poor input data quality. The software industry has not yet arrived at testing standards for producing software of acceptable but not perfect performance. 

Information System, Organisation and Strategy

1. Business & Organisation

Where it indicates the land and resources in World are getting limited, as well as the labour, the capita and the idea. Thus all of us has to process all of the limited sources so it can result or produce the new useful product and not wasting the limited resources. That is what the business and organisation are supposed to do in order to gain the goal and objective of the company. What is the connection to the Information System? the bureaucracies, the professional employee, which gain goal and objectives in a structure organisation are united by the information system how to develop it.

2. Business Environment

Where it indicates the business strategy with the structure of the company industry are involving a disruptive technology and nowadays many of the company of it becomes a dead old industry and instead making a new industry.

So, how IT impact to business?????

¨Economic Impact resulted in reduction of

¤Workforce

¤Fixed cost

¤Transaction cost (In-house or Outsource)

¤Agency cost which caused by agency problem

¤Distribution cost to (if we are involving distributor, but recommended to sell it by ourself.)

¨Organization and Behavior change

¤Flatten organization

¤Faster decision (immediate decision.)

Then, the IT bus understand about:

¨Business environment

¨Structure of the organization

¨Culture of the organization

¨Stakeholder of the system

¨Task, objectives and process that the system is designed for to gain goals properly

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