You
Don't Have the Right To Do It Wrong!
Don Gotterbarn
Ethics is no longer a luxury. We will not accept stories like the following. A large construction firm is under indictment for downgrading the quality of the concrete used in the construction of a bridge. They try to excuse this action by saying some unexpected difficulties caused a delay and they had to use lower quality concrete to avoid losing money. Lives are at stake here! They have endangered many lives, broken the law, and violated their professional engineering standards. They will be fined, lose their license, and probably someone will go to jail. This is the way it should be.
And now, we will no longer accept stories like the following. A large computer company is recalling a pacemaker which they programmed. It seems that they encountered some unexpected programming problems during development, so they lowered there test standards and did not do all the systems tests. This way they could complete the project within schedule and avoid losing money. Lives are at stake here! They have endangered many lives, and ... they will continue to produce bad programs.
Something is wrong -- Someone should be accountable! Computing has matured to a point where it has standards, methods, and techniques which, if employed, would reduce the likelihood of many computing disasters. The world will no longer accept the view that BUGS arise in programs by Spontaneous Generation. The BUGS (errors) were put there by people who should know better.
The failure to deliver quality products is unethical, even in computing. When unethical behavior has significant negative consequences laws will be made against that behavior.
At least six states are considering bills that require the licensing of computer professionals. There is also attention to this issue at the federal level. The movement toward licensing is aimed primarily at guaranteeing that computing practitioners meet a minimal skill level. These bills do not yet have a strong ethics component, but that is not far behind. For example, in California the movement is directed by an ethical issue. In someone violates the computer misuse act in California, they are prohibited from practicing computing for five years and they may not attend California schools to study computing. In order to prohibit people from practicing computing, you must license those who can practice computing.
The response to these bills by computing companies has been very negative. The complaints generally charge that the states are just looking for another source of revenue or that state legislatures are not competent to specify the minimal skill requirements for a computing professional, after all there are so many different areas in computing. Following this reasoning, I suppose we should also stop certifying physicians, after all there are so many different types of physicians and what do legislators know about medicine. I don't believe these arguments against licensing will be successful. There is too much at stake. The next time you are on a plane that is landing in the fog, keep in mind that the only part of the airplane that was not developed by a certified professional is the avionics software.
Whether these bills pass is not the real issue. At the moment these bills only address technical skills. Having the technical skill is a different issue from having the ethical will to insist that professional standards are met for the sake of the consumer of computer products and for the reputation of the company which produces these products. In many cases the ethical issues which arise are not connected to legal questions. For example, the IBM code of practices prohibits its employees from criticizing the competition. Legitimate criticism is not against the law. In some cases it is questionable whether there are legal issues involved. A system may violate privacy rights. For example, suppose you have built an interactive supermarket videotex system which determines if the user suffers from red-green color blindness and gives the user the best color picture based on this information. This does not seem to involve an ethical issue, unless the way in which you determined that they were red-green color blind required them to enter their name and you did not tell them that you were collecting this information about them. This is a technically sound project which has an unethical complexion because there was a failure to consider ethical issues in the development of the system. The ethical dimension vanishes here if the customer is told that the system will determine their visual capabilities or if the system is designed so that it can determine the best color presentation without connecting it to a customers name.
Sometimes there is just a failure to consider that the computer industry is a service industry. For some reason the computer industry has a USER ( a four letter word) and not clients or customers. USERS are viewed as the cause our problems and not as the people we serve. This failure to consider the USER leads to some significant computing problems. For example, a programmer was told to write a program which would automatically move an X-ray device to any position from the top of its support pole to the X-ray table top. The programmer executed this technical task with ease. Shortly after the system was installed, a technician told a patient to get off of the X-ray table and the technician set the height of the X-ray to table top. The patient did not get off the table in time and was crushed. Surely this was not the programmer's fault. If the programmer had been thinking about the USER and not just the technical issues, she might have installed a safety switch or required a confirmation to move the X-ray machine the last 18 inches to the table top.
If there is no sense of professional service and one simply as a "let the buyer beware" attitude then the software product will be of lower quality. For example, we might produce a hand held anti-tank missile launcher which effectively destroys tanks, but on occasion generates so much heat that it kills the person firing the missile. Without a sense of values, we could argue that the specifications only talked about the tank kill efficiency and the specifications didn't say anything about user safety. If we don't incorporate a sense of professionalism in our work we produce minimal quality products.
Contrary to common belief, computing professionals are not morally evil; but why are there all these ethical problems. There are two reasons. One is a lack of knowledge. The computing profession must become sensitive to ethical problems within the profession. This knowledge will lead to high quality products. Professional societies are responding to this need. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has recently revised its code of ethics. It is expects all its members to take social responsibility and report cases where they think society will be hurt. This goes beyond the minimal position in their old code which simply required that they not cause harm. The Association of Computing Machinery is currently revising its code of ethics to clearly articulate the responsibilities of the computing professional to their profession, their organization and society. I am on the task force for revising the ACM code of ethics and one of the issues we had to contend with was whether an ACM member could follow the revised code and be a loyal to their company. This was an easy question to answer for those companies which have public corporate ethical positions.
The second reason is a lack of support. There are some common attitudes about business. One is that business is interested in profits and another is that ethics and profits are incompatible. For some reason these notions prevail even though we have been shown over and over again that the second position is false. The prevailing view is that it does not pay to be ethical. Since nobody discusses ethics at work, it is too risky to raise any ethical concerns. When you are asked to program a X-ray control device, don't ask silly questions about a safety switch. When you are asked to program a videotex system don't ask silly question about privacy, people will think you are a trouble maker.
Corporations have to provide a support environment for ethical actions on two fronts. They must provide ethical standards for themselves and for all employees. They must Make It Easy To Be Ethical. They must also provide basic standards for software development and information which enforce ethical development of software.
How do you provide the ethical standards. Some corporations mistakenly think they provide an ethical environment by simply having a code of conduct and requiring all employees to read this once a year. This kind of procedure does not convey to employees that this policy is any more than lip service.
Even if the employees believes that this document represent corporate policy, it tends to create a checklist mentality. If a particular behavior is not on the list then I don't have to worry about it. This is a problem because all companies grow and encounter new situations not covered on their list. In addition to the list, companies have to develop an ethical attitude in their employees; attitudes like producing quality product is always in the best long term interest of the company and the customer.
The support and training tasks can be accomplished by a comprehensive corporate approach. This approach requires at least 4 elements:
a hotline for confidential discussion, an ombudsman at the highest corporate level, ethics training by all levels of management, and a code of conduct.
The company must do two almost contradictory things. First they must create an environment where it is normal and reasonable to ask ethical and quality questions. And second they must provide a confidential means for employees to raise significant ethical questions without feeling that their job is threatened.
The significance they give to this is evident by the place of ethics officers in corporations, e.g., the ethics officers of Boeing Computer Services, Raytheon, and Texas Instruments are all CEOs at the vice presidential levels. Their commitment to ethics education is underlined by their publication of weekly newsletters, texts and video training materials, and the personnel devoted to ethics training. In several major companies, there are ethics officers at each division location. The corporate commitment to professional ethics is underlined by the fact that all new employees receive ethics training from their line managers and not from some training officer.
The Boeing corporation is a good model. As early as 1964 Boeing emphasized corporate ethics. In 1964 they set up ethics committee. Each division has a business ethics department with ethics advisors. At some divisions, like Wichita there is a military ethics advisor and a commercial ethics advisor. Their teaching focuses on rules and broad principles rather than checklists. The training is delivered by line managers not training professionals. Boeing assumes employees take it more seriously if ethics is taught by a practitioner rather than by a training officer. To show their seriousness, they make maintenance of the ethics program and ethical behavior part of employees performance reviews. The telephone number of the local ethics officer is posted on all phones. If an employee has an ethics question they are expected to call the ethics officer. The ethics officer will perform an investigation. If there is any activity which is inconsistent with corporate policy, it will be stopped. The employee is confident that ethical behavior is both expected and supported and is taught what is expected. Boeing is not unique in this effort. There are many companies with ethics training, codes of conduct and ethics review committees. To name a few: Bank of America, Caterpillar Tractor, Chemical Bank, CITCORP, Exxon, J.C. Penny, Levi Strauss, Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, Raytheon, Stride Rite shoes, Xerox. Raytheon uses seminars run by line managers since ethical problems vary according to line of work. They even have an external Post office box for corporate director of ethics compliance.
In response to this interest, colleges and universities around the country have set up applied ethics centers. A number of consulting companies have also entered this area to provide training or teaching materials.
Studies on ethics training have shown some that repeated discussion of ethical issues among peers is the most effective way to teach ethics. It has also been shown that ethics education does make people "more moral." The indication here is that people generally want to do the right thing, and with training and opportunity they will try to do it.
With a corporate ethics policy in place which encourages and enables following the highest computing standards, the movement toward licensing is not a threat.