Sample Exam Solution in IT and Ethics - Assignment Example

PART A Question a) Why is it important for an organization to have a of ethics? of ethics provides an essential channel to carry out day-to-day decision making at organizational work. It explains the foundation of your organization, its aims, standards and mainly helping your employees recognize how these foundations interpret into day to day decisions, behaviors and dealings. Some people may think that codes of ethics are proposed to bound one’s actions, the most excellent codes of ethics are in fact structured to liberate and authorizes people to create additional efficient judgments with greater self-confidence. An organization uses efficient code of ethics for many purposes: although two important ones are: A code of ethics should 1) explain gray areas or queries employees have regarding organizational principles and opportunists and 2) assist in building confidence and dedication (Kenneth, 1998). Codes of ethics are considered to increase ethical potential, Legitimize discussion regarding ethical matters, support ethical judgment, and stay away from bad behavior supply a foundation for enforcement, responsibility and accountability provisions (Akula, 2000). One thing that differs for IT professionals, though, is the amount and multiplicity of codes of conduct that the IT professional may pass on to in their attempt to achieve the best ethical business solution in any morally ambiguous business computing situation. In conjunction with this difference is the lack of any real teeth to the IT professional’s codes of ethics: the code disciplinary provisions are merely as binding as the codes are, and these codes are not legally binding. As the environment of commerce produces ever further multifarious, especially in the development and provision of information technology, and more global, the need for one comprehensive code of ethics for IT professionals becomes even more advisable. With the Advent of more than a few formal codes of ethics ready by various IT professionals’ relations, a more harmonized approach seems to be called for (Allmon, 1990). Over the past two decades, the Information Technology (IT) field has gone through a transformation from simple number crunching activities, to centralized repositories of information, to disseminated, networked, cyberspace systems. During the same period, the computer user has evolved from solving pure computational problems to mission critical systems, from abstraction of work to virtual reality (Akula, 2000). With this technological advancement, academics, researchers, students, and other people would be firm pushed to claim similar progress in ethical awareness and thinking about IT related issues. There is a comprehensible ethical vacuum when dealing with local, national, and global issues. The information rebellion has turn out to be a tidal wave that threatens to engulf and alter professional and human values. Governments, organizations, and individuals, therefore, would make a grave mistake if they view the information revolution as merely technological. It is for the most part social and ethical. This capability introduces new factors in the professional decisions on property rights, residual rights, plagiarism, privacy, eavesdropping as well as violation of privacy. With the global interconnections between computer networks, negative events occur so with no trouble, from time to time without the initiators still bearing in mind the consequences, that ethical subjects are strengthen. Freedom of appearance is very much leveraged and exaggerated to the extent that far more high-quality may happen with the formation and distribution of information. Yet, it go after that the cost of unprincipled restricted or nationwide acts are evenly magnified (Allmon, 1990). The awareness of IT professionals and the public of the ethical and social responsibilities are on the rise. IT graduates, and even undergraduates, that intend to develop into professional in the field, need to develop a better understanding of the basic cultural, social, legal, and ethical issues inherent in the discipline of IT. They should understand the different dimensions (local, national and international) of the industry (Akula, 2000). b) The Australian Computer Society (ACS) has developed a code of ethics. Use the code of ethics developed by the ACS to answer the following questions about the dilemma below: I. What are the issues? Here we have the issue of the organizational interest where we have a colleague who discloses his past mistake is one of your best performing staff and is critical to the success of your area. But he has done a serious error. But at that time he did not admitted that, so for that mistake his manager was blamed. At that time he saved him self and sis not told the people the real problem that he is the main person behind this error. The issue is: he upholds the honor, dignity and effectiveness of the profession; he should be honest, forthright and impartial, 1 ii. Who are the stakeholders? Here we have three main stockholders The person that have made the mistake The manager who was blamed for mistake And my self as an evident or person who know the realty, it now on me that did I forward this issue to have the right decision, or I need to forgot this all. iii. What parts of the code of ethics are relevant to this problem? Below I have given the parts of the code of ethics that are relevant to this problem: 4.1- To uphold and advance the honor, dignity and effectiveness of the profession (a) Be honest, forthright and impartial, and (b) Loyally serve the community, and 4.3 Values and Ideals 4.3.3 Honesty 4.4 Standards of Conduct 4.5.2 I must endeavor to preserve the integrity and security of the Information of others. 4.6 Competence 4.6.4 I must respect and protect my clients and employers proprietary interests. 4.7 Honesty 4.7.1 I must not knowingly mislead a client or potential client as to the suitability of a product or service. 4.7.2 I must not misrepresent my skills or knowledge. 4.7.3 I must give opinions which are as far as possible unbiased and objective. 4.7.4 I must give realistic estimates for projects under my control. 4.7.5 I must qualify professional opinions which I know are based on limited knowledge or experience. 4.7.6 I must give credit for work done by others where credit is due. iv. What should you do? Support your answer using the relevant parts of the ACS code of ethics. According to 4.1-a I have to be honest, forthright and impartial in this problem and according to 4.2 I have to show loyally serve the community. But according to 4.5.2 I must endeavor to preserve the integrity and security of the information of others. Now three years have passed. And lot of time has gone, now I will try to preserve the integrity and security of information that I have got. So that that person is an efficient staff worker, now he has admitted, so I will try to save his information. 2 Question 2 a) Reasons for migrating to FOSS include i. Security and reliability. i. Length of usable product life and hardware life. The implementation of FOSS would radically cut software costs for the organizations or any other individual, while encouraging the exercise of legal software and dropping unlawful software piracy activities in the nation. It would not just guide to reduce in expenditures and dependence from foreign proprietary software manufacturers, although as well assure that software particularly urbanized for a known administration is reusable in comparable administrations and obtainable as Free/Open Source Software. The migration to FOSS will provide the more security and safety and better reliability as compared to proprietary software. Free and Open Source Software undoubtedly propose a full fledged, small price and prominent productive options for the on hand accumulates profitable and non profitable applications, OS and standard usefulness. Here are few features for which we will migrate to FOSS: You are not tied down by compatibility and license issues. Darwinian evolution process. One doesnt have to trust the vendor to find the flaws. You can actually modify it yourself b) Write an explanation of the GPL and the BSD licenses. Which one would you recommend? Explain your answer. BSD licenses The BSD license is a group of very easy and enormously broadminded licenses for computer software that was at the start urbanized at the University of California at Berkeley also known as UCB. It was first employed in year 1980 for the Berkeley Source Distribution (BSD), as well recognized as BSD UNIX, an improved version of the innovative UNIX operating system that was initial written in 1969 by Ken Thompson at Bell Labs. While far less programs are released beneath BSD-style licenses, this group of licenses is excessively significant for the reason that of the extensive use of BSD-licensed code in both free of charge and proprietary operating systems. 3 GPL licenses In the middle of year 80s, the GNU project shaped individual free of charge software licenses for every of its software packages. These were all restored in 1989 with edition 1 of the GNU General Public License known as GPL. Edition 2 of the GPL, unconfined in 1991, leaved on to turn out to be the majority generally utilized free software license. The GPL (GNU General Public License) is by far the majority widely exercised license for free software. The Linux kernel (operating system) in addition to a great deal of the other software usually included in Linux distributions has been unconfined under the conditions of the GPL.4 I have selected the GPL, because it is more flexible and useful for the open source software. They have clear terms and conditions that any one can perceive efficiently. PART B Question 3 Which software license is better for the future of the Software industry? July 1, 2008 Microsoft Corp. announced a novel volume software license that it spooked will be straightforward for business customers to administer and may yet save them a lot of money. Select Plus is an alternative of Microsofts on hand Select license and will be obtainable in the fall. Select-Plus will permit corporations to further with no trouble come together all their acquisitions, whether prepared by central IT, a little department or an overseas office, interested in a solitary account so they be able to make the most of their volume reductions, according to Chris Blackley, a manager for venture programs in the universal licensing and pricing group at Microsoft. Select-Plus, which will balance but not restore Select, be able to as well be set up as a continuous agreement, getting rid of the require for corporations to connect in extensive renegotiation with Microsoft and interior permissible and monetary review, he said. Select-Plus will as well cost the similar as Select, an established choice for corporations that do not desire to reimburse for a pricier venture agreement. Select, "while necessitating additional managerial operating cost, talked well to the mass that favor to reimburse a small additional for what it in fact does consume relatively than being seduced into disbursing a apparently inferior per element fee simply to in fact pay for material they dont require. Others might discover a limit in how Select-Plus clients would be able to put in on the discretionary Software Assurance preservation program fewer appealing. Software Assurance’s major improvement is that it assurance buyers afterward editions of the Microsoft software in difficulty if their license is yet suitable by the time it is released; the program essentially two times the price of licensing software Whereas an obligation of EA contracts, Software Assurance leftovers an option for Select Plus clienteles. But Select Plus customers who want SA must purchase it open for the whole 3-year term of their agreement, just as EA clienteles must. With Select, consumers have to still make a decision upfront whether or not they desire Software Assurance. But Microsoft has additional limits adjacent Software Assurance for Select clienteles. Select Plus clienteles would not have need of installing inventory software means on their equipment or distribution reports reverse to Microsoft and associates on how a great deal software they are running, Microsofts Blackley said “There is no association with Microsofts contentious Software Asset Management program, which has been disapproves of as a serious handed effort to notice corporations organization additional software than they have remunerated for, and power them to "true up" by business additional.5 Question 5 This question is based on Discussion Activity 3 (Green change that can be made by IT practice), To prepare for it, develop your answer for Discussion Activity 3 to 23 pages long. If you can reproduce your essay with references you will be well prepared for the exam question(s). At the present days we are worried for climate irregularities. These all happen due to pollution and current contamination of the whole natural recourses. These all happen due to the boost in the industrial side. They have placed such plans and factures that have started to affect the ecology and nature. At present these contaminations have affected the food chain of all live beings. But these all happen because of our ignorance and inefficient to understanding about environment. In this essay I will explain how we can bring green revolution with the help of IT. IT has affected all fields of life and this also influenced the nature. In this section I will discuss the ways by which we can bring the Green change. The biggest power of the IT is its remote communication facility. Till now the IT has developed to such extent, that communication facility to a person on the other end of world is possible for a common person. In the era of such remoteness we gave freedom of all time connectivity. So we can use this technology for the betterment of humans, by this we can produce awareness among the community. We can use TV, Internet, and telecommunication infrastructure to spread the message of green revolution. We can produce awareness among the people that: how they can contribute to save and protect the environment. It will guide them in right direction for the positive change in the thinking and environmental protection. Next thing we can do it with the help of IT is the minimization of energy consumption. Now IT has developed such devices those have reduced the size and utilize a very little energy, like pocket media players, laptops and lot of other such devices. This minimization also facilitates us but also proves us the way through which we can save our environment. By this the energy demand will decrease, so that the contamination related to energy production will cut down. So IT has played a major role in serving the nature, but it is now our responsibility to save and protect the nature. Question 6 (10 marks) This question is based on Discussion Activity 4 (ways in which modern Information Technology has changed the lives of individuals) To prepare for it, develop your answer for Discussion Activity 4 to 23 pages long. If you can reproduce your essay with references you will be wellprepared for the exam question(s). ways in which modern Information Technology has changed the lives of individuals. Information technology is radically shifting the basics of democratic cultures. Political questions are unwrapping to community conversation not merely in an envoy shape in assembly but as well in all categories of mass media. The calamity of contemporary democracies is able to be unspoken as the modification from the association among politicians and their community in parliament to their experience to mass media. This means, a novel assortment principle, alike to alter the theater to movie, and from Greek sport to games based on quantitative trials. Although, an additional fundamentally, information technology is a leading method of determining our intellectual individuality and/or impressive this individuality on others.    In difference to the earliest "policy," current democracies should be based on main beliefs potentially recognized and conventional by all individual beings, whether they are in the right place to a exact state or not. This state can simply be satisfied if autonomy of thoughts, which is certainly the foundation of all other self-governing values, does not stay restricted in occasion and freedom to verbal communication. The "public exercise" of cause depends. Contemporary democratic systems are not just based on liberty of communication but on its inexplicable association with liberty of the press. But one cause why we, in democracies, are involved in developing information technologies is that the inquiry of admission to what is being supposed and/or written is not a unimportance more, as the explanation honestly hypothetical it was. In an information civilization, the question of liberty of access has become vital. By information technology I mean chiefly all media in the course of by which we are capable to communicate artificially with all others. Impact of information technology on knowledge and Information technology, being functional to the storeroom and exploitation of knowledge, not only deforms the hierarchical beginning of knowledge but it as well potentially declines its monopolistic power by a community group. In other terminology, combination knowledge and information technology entails the option of plurality and oppose inside a civilization as well as among diverse societies. In order to in fact attain this pluralistic state of affairs. The impact of information technology on society would be able to be changed throughout the ethical perspective of technologies of the personality. The "self" is not the "self-worth" but the crossroads of usual and artificial scope during which we form our individualities, I denotes, our dissimilarity. Question 7 This question is based on Discussion Activity 5 (Does the use of IT raises or lowers the productivity of the workforce?) To prepare for it, develop your answer for Discussion Activity 5 to 23 pages long. If you can reproduce your essay with references you will be well prepared for the exam question(s). I am going to discuss that if the IT raises or lowers the productivity of the workforce? Here my opinion is: yes IT lowers the productivity of the workforce. Why? If we see around us then we are able to pensive that in each field we have IT involvement. We see machines and artificially intelligent appliances around us. Our daily life is sounded through these newly developed technological machines, software and lot of other thing related to IT revolution (Kenneth, 1998). All this has helped us to minimize the workload, but at the same time this makes us dull. We have washing machine to wash cloths, microwave own to cook food, high tech PDA (personal digital assistants) to take and mangers daily activities, and lot of other devises (Kenneth, 1998). In many fields around us IT has taken place to the human working. We have industrial robots for the manufacturing, artificially intelligent planes with no pilot, management software to mange project, digital security system, mathematical software to solve difficult problem (Kenneth, 1998). These are the few examples of the Human replacement by IT. In this situation the humans are not involved in such tasks; by this they have no need to face such condition, which makes them more sluggish. Their mental capabilities have stuck and they have no need to think for the critical issues. Like now a day’s kids have computer games, so they sit all the day in front computers and play. By this we can say that their mental capabilities have evolved but they become lazy physically. The new software can handle all tasks that human can perform, Like new artificially intelligent systems that, like expert system, fuzzy systems that can have capability to diagnose the patient, car, and lot of other thing for which they have developed (Kenneth, 1998). Now think if software of project management is used by the project manager, and he has to do no complex efforts for the project planning and handling, so his mental capabilities would be stuck. In such conditions he never utilizes its mental capabilities. Let’s think about a doctor that uses a Medical Expert system to diagnose the patients, this technique has facilitated him in his working but stop his mind for the thinking and decision making. So I have concluded that these new IT technological revolution have provided lot of facilities. This revolution makes our life easy and faster but at the same time it has put us in such situation where we are become slaves of these facilities, we do not live, work, or even think without these facilities. We can say that YES! IT lowers the productivity of the workforce. Now we have workforce with artificial, dependent and limited knowledge. So we also have to practice the critical thinking criteria. This also enlarges our caliber but also makes us more efficient in other field of life. References 1. Akula, J. L.: 2000, Spring, ‘Business Crime: What to Do When the Law Pursues You’, Sloan Management Review s41(3), 29–42. 2. Allmon, D. E. and J. Graneet: 1990, ‘Real Estate Sales Agents and the Code of Ethics: A Voice Stress Analysis’, Journal of Business Ethics 9(10), 807–812. Amgen: 2003, http://www.ext.amgen.com/investor/ codeOfconduct.html. 3. Hafner K., Markoff J. 1992. ‘Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier’; New York: Simon and Schuster. 4. Kenneth C. Laudon. 1998. ‘Management Information System Sixth Edition’; New York. Addison Wesley Publishing Company. 5. Rebecca Gurley Bace. 2000. “Intrusion Detection”, Macmillan Technical Publishing. Read More