The use of professional ethics in it industry assignment

This means if a person will not solve the issue with ethical decision for his or her personal or business matter will encounter series of problems. In order to avoid such ethical dilemmas in our life, ethics is divided into many categories which relates to good and bad for every part of our life. One of category of ethics is professional ethics which is related to professions. Professional ethics means the behaviour and practice adopted by the professional when carrying out professional work. Such works include consulting, researching, teaching, writing and etc.

Professional bodies are organizations which are responsible for developing professional ethics for each profession by designation of Codes of Conduct and Codes of Practice in order to observe their member’s behaviour in professional work (Professional Ethics, 2004). To make more explicit, professional codes of conduct are the codes of ethics which professional bodies create and require their members to perform to make good decisions without harming others in their field (A Critical Guide to Corporate Codes of Conduct, 2004).

To get the answers to these questions, it can be analyzed from previous study that when IT was a very young field, Parker, Swope and Baker (1990), cited by Kallman and Grillo (1996, p. 22), predicted that it will be difficult to apply of ethics in information science and technology rather than in other discipline. For instance, unethical actions can be performed faster using computer than performing manually. Like, some people access personal files although they are not authorized to do so.

In other case an incompetent IT professional might develop a piece software which affects overall performance and computer functional of the users computer at organization level, or a software engineer of a company A which is surviving in software market because of a software XYZ, release a source code to competitors, will lead to a disaster in the market and reputation A network engineer might leak the security codes of their secured network, or distribute/sell the software application by breaching copyright law, thus all resulting in unethical, piracy and privacy issues harming both individuals and organizations (Kallman & Grillo, 1996, p. ). But later, Hongladarom and Ess (2006, p. 153) cite Gorniak-Kocikowska (1996) prediction in this regard that as the computer revolution is fast, it will give rise to a revolution of ethics and that ethical issues will become a global ethics relevant to all areas of human life. Similar judgments were made by Bynum and Rogerson (1996) and Moor (1998) cited by (Hongladarom & Ess, 2006, p. 153). Still, ethicists foresee that as information technology increasingly pervade more and more aspects of life, ethical issues are increasing day by day (Hongladarom and Ess, 2006, p. 53). This shows that as the IT revolution is fast, there should be fast change in professional ethics related to IT, which are recognized universally and strictly abide within the IT industry. Now days, in IT industry, there are some ethical organizations which are constantly working to develop standards and code of conduct in order to deal with ethical dilemmas rising due to technology advancement.

Like wise, IT professional should also loose their membership permanently rather than only with a particular organization like ACM (Code of Ethics, 2007), when they commit a life threatening act e-g changing surgery or medicine information of any patient in the computer system of Surgeons or General Practitioner by unauthorised access, leakage of security codes of defence system of any country by cracking etc.

Therefore, it can be concluded that although BCS and other similar professional bodies are working continuously to fulfil the requirement of professional ethics i-e to standardize the IT industry by introducing and updating their code of conducts, professional development programmes and professional accreditation/certification, hence, due to the rapid growth in IT industry and voluntary status to follow these codes, society is still facing ethical dilemmas in IT industry like unauthorised access of information, leakage of source security codes, piracy etc.