Stakeholder List with Failure or Success of Ethical Application

It is a known fact that ICT professionals should follow a specific set of ethical conducts when they are about to delivery their respective duties towards their profession and the people associated with it. The ICT professionals are obligated to follow these set standards for ethical conduct throughout their professional career (Al-Saggaf, Burmeister & Weckert, 2015). In this particular given scenario, it has been found that there are many occurrences where it has been found that the ICT professionals have not followed the set conducts, including the ACS set of Ethical Conducts. The following report thus, would consist of the analysis of the given scenario with respect to the ACS codes of Ethical Conduct according to the case study.

a) Stakeholder List with failure or success of ethical application according to case study

The list of stakeholders that can be listed in this section for their success or failure of their code of conduct would be the employee and the reporting officer of NewAge Pty Ltd., namely Mr. McBright and Mrs. McDonald and the Mayor of LivingCity, Hon. Joseph Luck. The reasons for the success or failure of their ethical code of conduct can be listed in a tabular form as below with proper justifications:

Table 1: Stakeholder Success and Failure List

(Source: Created by the Author)

b) Ethical Dilemma each stakeholder experiences

Every stakeholder listed according to the case study had also faced ethical dilemma situations with respect to the case study analysis. These ethical dilemma situations can be listed as below:

• McBright, the employee of NewAge Pty Ltd: Mr. McBright is a mere employee in the organization where he has to report to Mrs. McDonald, who is specified as a person with low moral values. Mr. McBright was responsible for looking after the development process of the Operating System for their client XYZ Pty Ltd. he had identified a bug in the system and had reported his boss Mrs. McDonald about the case and also suggested a remodeling of the entire software before handing it over to the client. Instead he was ordered to keep this bug a secret and carry on with the project anyhow (Whitehouse et al., 2016). This has been an ethical dilemma situation for Mr. McBright as he had to choose between two decisions. One, to inform the development team anyhow for the benefit of the client and harm the company, another, to listen to his boss.
• McDonald, the person responsible for the project: When Mrs. McDonald had been informed by Mr. McBright about the situation regarding the bug found in the Operating System; she had been in an ethical dilemma situation. This was to choose between the loss of the company by missing the client deadline while redeveloping the entire software, and keeping on with the project and handling the clients with buggy software making no loss for the company.
• Joseph luck, the mayor of LivingCity: As the mayor of the LivingCIty, where NewAge had its headquarters, Hon. Joseph luck was asked to interfere in the case against the arson and loss caused by NewAge to other organizations. This was an ethical dilemma situation for him as he had to choose between the ethically correct decision or side with NewAge, since the company had been a primary employer for the city.

c) Ethical Response of the Stakeholders to the dilemma

According to the case study, the responses of these stakeholders are being listed below, along with the ethical decisions that should have been taken:

d) Relevance of the actions of the Stakeholders according to the ACS code of Professional Conduct

According to the ACS codes of Conduct, the actions of the stakeholders are related as below:

1. The Primacy of the Public Interest: This Code of Conduct has been violated by the stakeholders, since they never thought about the public interest, rather they had invested in their selfish demand altogether.
2. The Enhancement of Quality of Life: The actions of the stakeholders did nothing to exhume the quality of life as the people affected by the actions of the stakeholders had faced arson, loss of life and loss of confidential financial data.
3. Honesty: None of the stakeholders were honest in their actions, otherwise the scenario would not have occurred altogether (Resnik & Elliott, 2016).
4. Competence: Diligence and competence is not maintained since the product that was developed by NewAge by the development team had been buggy and not revamped after detection of the bug.
5. Professional: There was no professional development noticed in the action of the stakeholders as they had been dishonest towards their profession and the people affected by their actions.
6. Professionalism: Integrity would have only been maintained when the professionalism along with the integrity had been maintained by the organization and the employees. They had lacked in maintaining this code of conduct as well.

e) Analysis of the case study according to ethical philosophy

According to the philosophy of ethical conducts, an ICT professional should be true to their work as per the deontological and consequential theories (Burmeister, 2017). However, none of them had been followed by the stakeholders since they might have been right according to the decisions they took in their conscience but all of them were wrong according to the human moral values. This is because; their actions have been harming the humankind in the end.

Conclusion

Ethical Dilemma each Stakeholder Experiences

In conclusion, it can be said that the actions of the stakeholders have been unprofessional and ethically incorrect given the relevance of both ACT codes of professional conduct and the Ethical Philosophy perspectives. Both the stakeholders for NewAge Pty Ltd. had been at fault along with the mayor of LivingCity, Hon. Joseph Luck. They had all ultimately failed in maintaining their professional and ethical codes of conduct

Subtask 2

Introduction

A guideline framework developed in the aid of professionals and employers in the field of Information and Communication technology to help them chose their professional proficiency is known as the SFIA-6 framework (Shrestha, Kong & Collins, 2017). The following report would be based on devising a career plan along with timelines and milestones based on this framework.

Reflective interpretation of the SFIA-6 Framework

As per my thoughts, SFIA-6 framework provides a proper guideline to any person pursuing education in ICT-based career or appearing graduation. The segmented structure of the framework is very helpful and I have been properly able to make out a career plan based on this since the levels of the framework are properly described (Konsky, Miller & Jones, 2016). I now know, what should be my first step after graduation to pursue a successful ICT career.

Selection of the responsibility level according to SFIA-6 and its justification according to an ICT Professional

According to the framework and levels of the SFIA-6, it is better that the Level 1 responsibility should be chosen for the advancement of a student to a particular career prospects in the field of IT (Butler et al., 2018). Level 1 is the phase under the supervision of all the levels of professional world, which is required as just the starting phase of a career would require understanding of the profession being under supervision of the seniors.

Responsibility level of SFIA-6 with milestones and timeline of the career plan

Table 3: Career Plan with timeline and milestones

(Source: Created by the Author)

Conclusion

In conclusion, it can be said that for a student just finished with his or her graduation, it is justified that the SFIA-6 Framework for level 1 responsibility is followed as a career plan. The other levels can be devised as the person gradually gains more experience in the field of ICT. For the help of a student, a timeline and milestone career plan has been devised. This structured and strategic planning would help ICT graduates as well as experienced professionals to look forward in their career in a much more structured way.

References

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Al-Saggaf, Y., Burmeister, O., & Weckert, J. (2015). Reasons behind unethical behaviour in the Australian ICT workplace: An empirical investigation. Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, 13(3/4), 235-255.

Burmeister, O. K. (2017). Professional ethics in the information age. Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, 15(4), 348-356.

Butler, D., Leahy, M., Twining, P., Akoh, B., Chtouki, Y., Farshadnia, S., … & Valtonen, T. (2018). Education Systems in the Digital Age: The Need for Alignment. Technology, Knowledge and Learning, 1-22.

Butler, M., Sheard, J., Morgan, M., & Weerasinghe, K. F. S. A. (2015, January). Understanding the Teaching Context of First Year ICT Education in Australia. In Proceedings of the 17th Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE 2015)(Vol. 27, p. 30).

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Resnik, D. B., & Elliott, K. C. (2016). The ethical challenges of socially responsible science. Accountability in research, 23(1), 31-46.

Shrestha, A., Kong, E., & Collins, P. (2017, December). Facilitating knowledge transfer for innovation: towards a decision support system to identify knowledge stock in the ICT profession. In Proceedings of the 28th Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS 2017). Australian Association for Information Systems.

Topi, H. (2015). Using ICT competence frameworks to support curriculum development. ACM Inroads, 6(3), 36-37.

Valentine, S., Fleischman, G., & Bateman, C. R. (2015). An Exploratory Study of Professional Ethical Standards, Positive Budgeting Orientation, and The Mediating Role of Corporate Ethical Values. Accounting & Taxation, 7(1), 1.

von Konsky, B., Miller, C., & Jones, A. (2016). The Skills Framework for the Information Age: Engaging Stakeholders in ICT Curriculum Design. Journal of Information Systems Education, 27(1), 37-50.

Whitehouse, D., Duquenoy, P., Kimppa, K. K., Burmeister, O. K., Gotterbarn, D., Kreps, D., & Patrignani, N. (2016). Twenty-five years of ICT and Society: Codes of Ethics and Cloud Computing. ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society, 45(3), 18-24.