Objective Ethics for Managing InformationTechnology

Abstract

Businessmen have faced ethical dilemmas throughout history in many varying contexts. Today, chief information officers (CIOs) and information technology (IT) managers, in particular, face many ethical dilemmas from not only traditional business dilemmas, but also in managing IT. Traditional ethical issues of business, such as receiving gifts and promotional items from vendors, affect any manager in charge of purchases. In addition, IT managers must also make decisions with regards to technological issues such as information privacy, security, and accountability. IT facilitates action, both good and bad. This means that individuals can act good with far more efficiency and act bad with more malevolence. Actions that may not have been possible without IT now become issues because people have the means to do them. Managers need not only to adopt a moral code for themselves, but to encourage their employees to adopt a moral code or guard against and appropriately