Franchu’s Lair

If you have been following the news, you have probably noticed that many of the problems that the economy is facing stem from risky – when not deliberately illegal – practices. In that sense, it will be difficult to forget the subprime morgages fiasco, Ponzi schemes pulled off by hedge funds managers, among many others that the society is already aware of, and who knows how many more are still waiting to make their appearance.

I believe that greed and bad business practices carried out for a long time by people who were entrusted to protect the economy are at the root of most of the problems the global economy faces today. Lies and speculation wove the fabric that sustained the stock market and the banking system, and those are very dangerous threads to make something that can hold in one piece and resist the test of time.

That is why I believe that professional codes of ethics are a useful tool, not that much from a legal point of view, but as a reminder to the individual of what is acceptable and what is not, and provide a set of guidelines to rule ones day to day professional activities. As an example of what these codes of ethics look like, we can take a look at the IEEE Code of Ethics and the ACM Code of Ethics.

Let’s go through them quickly:

• ACM
  • Contribute to society and human well-being.
  • Avoid harm to others
  • Be honest and trustworthy
  • Be fair and take action not to discriminate
  • Honor property rights including copyrights and patent
  • Give proper credit for intellectual property
  • Respect the privacy of others
  • Honor confidentiality
  • Strive to achieve the highest quality, effectiveness and dignity in both the process and products of professional work
  • Acquire and maintain professional competence
  • Know and respect existing laws pertaining to professional work
  • Accept and provide appropriate professional review
  • Give comprehensive and thorough evaluations of computer systems and their impacts, including analysis of possible risks
  • Honor contracts, agreements, and assigned responsibilities
  • Improve public understanding of computing and its consequences
  • Access computing and communication resources only when authorized to do so
  • Articulate social responsibilities of members of an organizational unit and encourage full acceptance of those responsibilities
  • Manage personnel and resources to design and build information systems that enhance the quality of working life
  • Acknowledge and support proper and authorized uses of an organization’s computing and communication resources
  • Ensure that users and those who will be affected by a system have their needs clearly articulated during the assessment and design of requirements; later the system must be validated to meet requirements
  • Articulate and support policies that protect the dignity of users and others affected by a computing system
  • Create opportunities for members of the organization to learn the principles and limitations of computer systems
• IEEE
  • Accept responsibility in making decisions consistent with the safety, health and welfare of the public, and to disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public or the environment
  • Avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible, and to disclose them to affected parties when they do exist
  • Be honest and realistic in stating claims or estimates based on available data
  • Reject bribery in all its forms
  • Improve the understanding of technology, its appropriate application, and potential consequences
  • Maintain and improve our technical competence and to undertake technological tasks for others only if qualified by training or experience, or after full disclosure of pertinent limitations
  • Seek, accept, and offer honest criticism of technical work, to acknowledge and correct errors, and to credit properly the contributions of others
  • Treat fairly all persons regardless of such factors as race, religion, gender, disability, age, or national origin
  • Avoid injuring others, their property, reputation, or employment by false or malicious action
  • Assist colleagues and co-workers in their professional development and to support them in following this code of ethics

There you have it, a simple set of rules, sensible and perfectly reasonable, and spelled in plain english free of all the legalese that nowadays permeates every corporate sentence. And still, how many times have you been pressured (by others or by yourself) to ignore or trespass the aforementioned good practices? I agree that it is very tempting to circumvent or ignore those principles when a critical deadline approaches or a superior asks you to do something in a non-orthodox way; but if you break any of those principles you are breaking the trust you have been given to carry out your task in a socially acceptable way. You have to be able to explain people why you are not going to take shortcuts and contravene those basic principles, and make them see that it would have consequences.

I like to believe that technology companies learnt a lesson after the dot-com bubble burst, and therefore are better prepared in the current crisis, but the young graduates that are entering the work force right now have to be the ones ensuring that the codes of ethics widely accepted are followed strictly, in order to outroot the bad practices from the past.

Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.
William Pollard

Innovation comes from the producer – not from the customer.
W. Edwards Deming