Professional identity and ethical engagement in the international ICT community

Importance and Key Contribution ICT is increasingly critical to many services and activities and its failure can have significant consequences. There are many reasons for such failures, some with ethical dimensions. Failure... [ view full abstract ]

Importance and Key Contribution
ICT is increasingly critical to many services and activities and its failure can have significant consequences. There are many reasons for such failures, some with ethical dimensions. Failure can be malicious, or inadvertently caused by failure to adequately protect IT systems. This paper proposes that developing a more coordinated and engaged approach to ICT ethics is critical to developing ICT as a profession. Developing the ethical dimension in ICT should contribute to increasing the status and professional identity of those who work in ICT, impacting the quality and integrity of ICT services, and reducing risks to society.
Currently within the ICT field there are multiple professional bodies based on particular specialities, which have their own codes of ethics, but there is no coordinated approach to ethics taken by ICT as whole. Additionally, there is little data about levels of engagement and compliance with various ICT codes of ethics and limited international cooperation in terms of aligning them. The current lack of a coherent ethical framework for ICT is in contrast to other professions such as medicine or law, which have codes of ethics and possible penalties in place for non-compliance.
This paper develops previous research done on the ethics component of developing ICT as a profession during three European Commission funded research projects (McLaughlin et al, 2012; Veling et al, 2013, McLaughlin et al, 2014) whose aim was to provide evidence informed policy guidance on developing ICT as a profession and thus ensuring agreed ethical and professional standards of practice.
Our key contribution is to provide an analysis of the challenges in developing ethics within ICT and possible policy and practice responses as identified by a range of international stakeholders, including practitioners, professional bodies, employers, and educators. It is an informative example of developing ethics within a profession and addressing the challenge of getting engagement from practitioners on a global level.
Theoretical Base
The theoretical context in which this discussion of ICT ethics takes place is informed by work on professionalism, ethics, and the relationship between them. The original motivation of this research was to provide guidance to policy makers and practitioners involved in ICT rather than to develop theoretical understanding per se.
Professionalism
The centrality or otherwise of ethics in ICT professionalism has been much discussed (Weckert and Lucas, 2013) and there is also long historical debate about the nature of professionalism itself (Chua et al, 1993). Our previous research (McLaughlin et al, 2012) developed a model of ICT professionalism within a European context, which was developed from an analysis of the literature (Agresti, 2008; Denning and Frailey, 2011) and input from stakeholders collected through surveys and interviews. The model consists of four building blocks: competences; education and training; professional ethics; bodies of knowledge. This paper presents data on stakeholders’ experiences of the professional ethics building block to inform the holistic development of all of the building blocks of the profession.
Ethics
This research originated from a wider agenda at the EU policy level to investigate and address a practical problem concerning the fragmented and under-developed nature of the ICT profession, of which ethics is key component, and the associated difficulties relating to economic growth and the potential risk of ICT failures. The theoretical approach to ethics taken in this study was a consequentialist approach based on the perceived value of its positive outcomes rather than a principle or virtue-driven approach.
There are specific challenges in developing ethics within the ICT profession. Firstly, ICT is pervasive in many jobs and roles and there is no clear agreement whether ICT is distinctive and cohesive enough to be ‘a profession’ in the standard sense. This may mean that a standardised ethics protocol is unlikely to be workable (Weckert and Lucas, 2013).
Secondly, there are also cultural and geographical differences in approaches to ICT and information management that impact on ethical issues (Sherry, 2013; Peeter and Baghi, 2012). Thirdly, the rapid rate of technological change in ICT means new ethical challenges tend to emerge more quickly than appropriate guidelines can be developed. Finally, in most regions, women and minority groups are underrepresented in the ICT profession, which some participants considered to be an issue of social justice that the ICT profession has an ethical imperative to address.
Research Questions
RQ.1: To what extent do ethics contribute to the development of the professional identity of ICT practitioners?
RQ.2: What practices and policies can promote the development of and engagement with ICT ethics?
RQ.3: To what extent can these practices and policies be usefully coordinated internationally?

Findings
RQ.1
Most participants agreed that ethics was a very important issue for the ICT profession but also a difficult one to address. Despite the initial pragmatic framing of the research, many participants evoked a principled stance based on duties and their own professional identity when questioned on ethics in ICT. A key difficulty, however, is that different countries and indeed sectors have different definitions or views on what an ICT professional is. ICT is so pervasive that it is was felt very challenging to have generalised ethical guidelines. It was agreed, for example, that ICT professionals would have played a role in recent banking crisis but their responsibility vis à vis those working in the business functions was difficult to establish. In many cases ICT professionals are outside the ‘circle of power’ in organisations, partly as a result of the low status of the profession, and do not have the authority to call a halt to unethical practices which rely on ICT.
RQ.2
The difficulties associated with defining and delineating ethical responsibility in the integrated and diffuse role of ICT, which often supports rather than leads organisational activities, is particularly challenging. Participants’ experiences of addressing such issues varied considerably. Education and continuing professional development (CPD), for example, were seen as a crucial mechanism for strengthening practitioners’ engagement with ethics from the outset. Indeed, ICT ethics is even incorporated into elementary education in some regions.
The issue of penalties for noncompliance or restrictions to practice were felt to be appropriate in certain safety critical or sensitive areas such as healthcare or aerospace as the implications of failure can potentially be catastrophic – often literally a matter of life or death. A ‘licence to practice’ is used in many professions as a safeguard that only professionals who have studied, been certified, and adhere to certain professional and ethical standards are allowed to practice. It was agreed, however, that the varied nature of ICT makes implementing and enforcing a certification or ‘licence to practice’ highly problematic. In fact, most participants reported that there had been strong resistance to any proposals for licencing from the ICT profession in their country.
RQ.3
There is currently no global ICT professional ethical strategy or framework and there is a wide variation in how much progress different regions have made in promoting ICT ethics. There are also important differences between cultures about who should take responsibility for ethics in terms of the organisation employing ICT professionals or the ICT profession itself.
Implications
This study provides some insights into the complexity of ethics within the ICT profession but its implications are wider. ICT is now so pervasive that the distinctions between ICT ethics and, for example, medical or business ethics are likely to become more blurred and thus it essential for all professions that there is a clear understanding of the ethical dimensions of ICT. It also shows that developing ethics in the abstract may be relatively straightforward, for example most professional ICT bodies have codes of ethics. Ensuring full engagement from practitioners combined with the empowerment to act on such codes, however, is not straightforward. Finally no efforts to improve ethics in the workplace can now ignore the global context but this study of ICT ethics demonstrates that this global view also presents new challenges of coordination and possible cultural conflict.
References
Agresti, W. 2008. An IT body of knowledge: The key to an emerging profession. IEEE IT Professional, 10 (6): 18-22.
Chua, W.F., Poullaos, C. 1993. Rethinking the profession-state dynamic: The case of the Victorian charter attempt, 1885–1906. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 18 (7-8): 691-728.
Denning, P.J., Frailey, D.J. 2011. The profession of IT. Who are we – now? Communications of the ACM. 54 (6): 25-27.

McLaughlin, S., et al. 2012. e-Skills and ICT Professionalism: Fostering the ICT Profession in Europe. The European Commission.
McLaughlin, S., et al 2014. e-Skills: The International dimension and the Impact of Globalisation. The European Commission.
Peeter, K., Baghi, K. 2012. The impact of trust and changes in trust: A national comparison of individual adoptions of information and communication technologies and related phenomenon. International Journal of Information Management. 32 (5): 431-441.
Sherry, X.L. 2013. National strategy for digital records: Comparing the approaches of Canada and China. International Journal of Information Management. 33 (4): 697-701.
Veling, L. et al. 2013. Governance Framework for ICT Professionalism Proposal. The European Commission.
Weckert, J., Lucas, R. (Eds) 2013. Professionalism in the Information and Communication Technology Industry, ANU Press, Canberra.

ICT Professionalism Ethics International ethics Ethics training [ view full abstract ]

ICT Professionalism
Ethics
International ethics
Ethics training