Doing Ethics Technique for Australian Computer Society

Describe about the Doing Ethics Technique for Australian Computer Ssociety.

The scenario

The summary case illustrates an ICT based ethical dilemma took place in Australian computer society. An organizational conflict occurred between the manager, test quality analyzer and the analysts from the vendors. The team was working on a software ERP-SAP project. Due to lack of knowledge an internal contradiction occurred and the team members got affected with that.

Analysis with Doing Ethics Technique

What’s going on?

Doing ethics technique is a process that is used to analyze ICT related ethically questionable situation raised in an organization or in any workplace. Jennings, (2014) stated that, DET maintains certain rules and regulations that help to think a person ethically. The synopsis depicts the major issues that took place within Australian Computer society (ACS), among the employees of the organization. In this case, the ethically questionable situation was raised for Jim, who was the member of Australian computer society. It has been found that, after taking all the responsibilities to give quality assurance to the client for a particular project, Jim had to suffer due to some jealous person. After started working for the company, the project manager Ken, leave his post and all the responsibilities come over to Jim as he was the test consultant to the client.

 What are the facts?

Jim was hired as a consultant to provide testing and quality assurance services to their clients. Jim was the team leader and the testing manager was Ken. The project was based on SAP (System, Application Product), which is one of the most advance ERP resource planning software (Australian Computer Society, 2016). While, the manager testing manager suddenly left the company Jim, took all the responsibilities and started working on the project with two other analysts working on the same project. Nevertheless, he realized that the project analysts Col and Al have not enough knowledge on SAP functionality and other testing components and it become difficult for him to complete the project within the given deadline. In order to help the testing analysts Jim also organized a workshop. After working for a long time, it was realized that, the project cannot be completed within the given deadline due to Al (Australian Computer Society, 2016). Al was considered to be unprofessional and his service was no longer required for the project.

What are the issues?

The major issue in any workplace is organizational conflict. During team work the team members should co-operate each other support and motivation is also required for every individual (Bryman & Bell, 2015). In this case, though most of the responsibilities were served by Jim but still at the end he had to suffer. For example, a software development team of a Multinational company is working on a financial banking software project. The developer team consists of 8 members but all of them are not experienced enough (Natale & Doran,  2012). The members who are experienced had to take more responsibilities than others. However, during project development the work load declined more towards the experienced employees and gradually, the rate of absenteeism of those employees enhanced. The team leader felt helpless due to the intra team conflict.

Who is affected? 

Considering the case study, it is defined that the affected person is Jim, the test consultant and the quality assurance server. Another affected person is the client of the project. In the year of 2013 the concept of crypto wall 2.0 was raised where, the user’s personal files were getting encrypted by the hackers (Peng, 2013). After giving online bit coins only they users can retrieve their personal data from the hackers. Here, the internet users were affected. This incident came up as a major issue in the usage of ICT (Internet Communication Technology) for organizational and personal use. User’s personal data including banking details are getting hacked by the hackers and as they did not use shared key. The users do not have the decryption key thus they are unable to decrypt their data from the hackers.

What are the ethical issues and implication?

Among most of the issues raised in this case the main sufferer was Jim, who played a vital role during the development of the IT project but still at the end he was rejected by the interviewer (Australian Computer Society, 2016). The reason of rejection was no outsider but his own previous project manager. The interviewer received some bad review about Jim and thus, he cancelled the interview session.

What can be done about it?

In order to reduce the intra organization conflict, once the project was assigned for a particular team they must organize relevant training and development programs for the members of the team (Runeson et al., 2012). In this case the project was based on SAP- ERP software, thus the training program should be conducted on SAP. Additionally, motivation among the team members is important to avoid jealousy between each other. 

What options are there?

The technique follows some steps where initially the issue is analyzed and then suitable solutions are provided to the situation in order to reduce the problem. In order to avoid ICT based ethical dilemma within the organization different options are provided by various authors during the implication. Ethical issues are those sections of any organizational which can create major failure during the working progress. A code of conduct can be created with the help of some ethical example (Ritchie et al., 2013). Workshops must be arranged conducted by well known ethics speakers. Organization should develop real versus budget report tools based on the SAP project.

Which option is best and why?

Among the given option the most effective solution is development of tool based SAP project, so that the employees working on the same project feel motivated and the rate of working progress grow higher (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2013). Once the employees will feel interested on the project they will try to gain additional knowledge on this. Additional knowledge will help them to grab experience for their upcoming future.

References

Australian Computer Society, (2016). Australian Computer Society,. (2016). Australian Computer Society | ACS Code Of Professional Conduct Case Studies | March 2014., 21.

Bryman, A., & Bell, E. (2015). Business research methods. Oxford University Press, USA.

Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2013). Research methods in education. Routledge.

Ferrell, O. C., & Fraedrich, J. (2015). Business ethics: Ethical decision making & cases. Nelson Education.

Hartman, L. P., DesJardins, J. R., & MacDonald, C. (2014). Business ethics: Decision making for personal integrity and social responsibility. McGraw-Hill.

Jennings, M. M. (2014). Business ethics: Case studies and selected readings. Cengage Learning.

Natale, S. M., & Doran, C. (2012). Marketization of education: An ethical dilemma. Journal of business ethics, 105(2), 187-196.

Peng, S. (2013). BITCOIN: Cryptography, Economics, and the Future.

Ritchie, J., Lewis, J., Nicholls, C. M., & Ormston, R. (Eds.). (2013).Qualitative research practice: A guide for social science students and researchers. Sage.

Runeson, P., Host, M., Rainer, A., & Regnell, B. (2012). Case study research in software engineering: Guidelines and examples. John Wiley & Sons.