Five Moral Dimensions Of The Information Essay

1.The Moral Dimensions of Information Systems The moral dimensions that can control the major ethical and social concerns generated by information systems are as follows: (i) Information Right and Obligation What information rights do individuals and organizations possess with respect to themselves? What can they protect? What obligation do individuals and organization have concerning this information? (ii) Property Rights and Obligations How will traditional intellectual property rights be protected in a digital society in which tracing and accounting forownership is difficult and ignoring such property rights is so easy? (iii) Accounting Liability and Control Determining who should take responsibility for decisions and actions. Many of the laws and court decisions and actions establishing precedents in the area of accountability, liability and control were firmly in place long before information systems were invented. (iv) Quality of System This has to do with data quality and system errors. As werely more on information systems, data quality issues are gaining more importance. These issues affect you as a consumer and as a user. (v) Quality of Life An interesting quality of life issue that affects more and more people personally is the ability to work from home. Before the advent of  information systems most people used to have a regular day job 8.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m., five days a week in a typical office setting in our society. But with the introduction of information systems people can work seven days a week, all hours of the day, at home and on their wayse specially the management staff in a company. Also, the quality of life issues would be incomplete without mentioning online love affairs. People also lose their jobs and ways of life because of information systems. All these are valid concerns of information systems. 2.Ethical Analysis This section presents various step processes of how one should analyze ethical concerns when confronted with such asituation: (i) Identify and Clearly Describe the Facts This involves finding out who did what to whom, and where; when and how. In most cases, you will be astonished of them is takes in the initially reported facts, and you will find that simply getting the facts straight helps in defining the solution. Also, this assists other opposing parties involved in an ethical quandary to agree with the facts. (ii) State the Inconsistency and Identify the Higher-Order Values Involved The parties involved in disputes over ethical, social and political concerns always claim to pursue higher values such as privacy, freedom and protection of property. It is very important to clearly define the conflict in ethical concerns and identify the ones with higher values. (iii) Identify the Stakeholders You must find out the identity of the stakeholders as every ethical, social and political issues have stakeholders; players in the game who have an interest in the outcome and that have invested in the situation and what they want. (iv) Identify the Reasonable Options to Select It may be discovered that none of the options may ever satisfy all the interest involved while some of the options performs a better job than others. So, sometimes concluding at a good or ethical solution may not always be a balancing of consequences to stakeholders. 3.Property rights and obligations trade secrets copyright patent law Trade secrets are any intellectual work or product used for a business purpose that can be classified as belonging to that business. Copyright protects the creators of a property against copying by others for any purpose during the life of the author. Patent law grants the owner an exclusive monopoly on the ideas behind an invention for 20 years.