What are the two meanings of “corporate ethics” in organizations today?

Regardless of where a company stands in the process, IT leaders should be ready to contribute, he says.

“These policies are worked out on the ethics and compliance committees below the board level, and they’re having the CIO as a key player,” Distelhorst explains. That’s the case at Intel Corp., says the company’s chief information officer, Diane Bryant.

 

Intel’s Ethics and Compliance Oversight Committee established the following five principles for the company and its workers: Intel should conduct business with honesty and integrity; the company must follow the letter and spirit of the law; employees are expected to treat one another fairly; employees should act in the best interest of Intel and avoid conflicts of interest; and employees mus protect the company’s assets and reputation.

 

“Intel’s IT staff builds and maintains the systems that allow the company to meet its legal and regulatory requirements, such as those laid out for accounting and governance by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act,” Bryant says. It also developed applications and a team of workers to handle document retention, which is crucial should there be a legal case with electronic discovery requests.

 

But IT also enables Intel to enforce its own values and not just meet regulatory requirements, Bryant explains. So there are applications to help perform rigorous checks on suppliers to ensure that they have sufficient business continuity plans and environmental sustainability plans, as well as ethical stances that match Intel’s own. IT has also delivered sophisticated systems that monitor the power consumption and carbon dioxide emissions of Intel’s data centers. And it developed systems that monitor for potential malicious behavior, such as violations of access management rights or the public release of Intel’s intellectual property.

 

“We put solutions in place that help protect Intel’s five principles,” Bryant says.

 

Few companies are that advanced in their use of technology to further an ethical agenda. “Companies recognize that they have to be on record as being committed, but they’re not yet as convinced that they have to manage it like other parts of their business,” Hanson explains.

 

But when companies do decide to move in that direction, that’s when chief information officers can shine, offering ideas on what metrics to use and what to measure.

“That’s where IT can be a real leader,” Hanson says, “since they know what can be measured and captured.”

 

 

 

1. What are the two meanings of “corporate ethics” in organizations today? What does each definition imply for IT practices? How does the economic environment affect this?
2. How does IT provide more opportunities for difficult ethic issues to arise? How does IT help address those opportunities? Use examples from the case to justify your answer.
3. Should organizations pursue high ethical standards regardless (or in spite of) their bottom-line impact? Or should they limit themselves to those scenarios where “good ethics make for good business”?