Ethical Underpinnings in the Design and Management of ICT Projects

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of embedding ethical principles, especially power-based equality, throughout the lifecycle of ICT projects to prevent undesirable outcomes and promote fair, responsible management.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive framework linking ethics to design, deployment, and management of ICT projects, and proposes a method to model their influence on power relationships.

Findings

Ethical frameworks must guide deployment and management, not just design.

Power-based equality is crucial to prevent reinforcing inequalities.

A modeling method helps visualize ICT project's influence on power dynamics.

Abstract

With a view towards understanding why undesirable outcomes often arise in ICT projects, we draw attention to three aspects in this essay. First, we present several examples to show that incorporating an ethical framework in the design of an ICT system is not sufficient in itself, and that ethics need to guide the deployment and ongoing management of the projects as well. We present a framework that brings together the objectives, design, and deployment management of ICT projects as being shaped by a common underlying ethical system. Second, we argue that power-based equality should be incorporated as a key underlying ethical value in ICT projects, to ensure that the project does not reinforce inequalities in power relationships between the actors directly or indirectly associated with the project. We present a method to model ICT projects to make legible its influence on the power relationships between various actors in the ecosystem. Third, we discuss that the ethical values underlying any ICT project ultimately need to be upheld by the project teams, where certain factors like political ideologies or dispersed teams may affect the rigour with which these ethical values are followed. These three aspects of having an ethical underpinning to the design and management of ICT projects, the need for having a power-based equality principle for ICT projects, and the importance of socialization of the project teams, needs increasing attention in today's age of ICT platforms where millions and billions of users interact on the same platform but which are managed by only a few people.