Real-world ethics: Data and analytics

- The American author, Mark Twain said, "Data is like garbage. You better know what you're going to do with it before you collect it." While he was striving for humor, he was correct, but he missed something. You need to understand what you will do with data and what you won't do with it. Let's look at a scenario to explore the ethics of managing data and analytics. Lisa is managing a program for her rapidly growing organization. Her company purchased two other companies about a year ago. They have finally gotten around to consolidating data from her company and the two purchase companies into a single data repository. Lisa is focusing on data related to benefits, particularly retirement funds. Each company had different policies for these benefits and Lisa's company decided to create one policy for all employees. That policy has been agreed and shared with all the employees. So it's Lisa's job to apply the new benefits policy as she merges the data into one platform. As Lisa's team is analyzing the data, they see some anomalies. Things just aren't adding up, literally. It appears the actual employee retirement balances for many employees are less than what's been reported. Her team reviewed the data multiple times to confirm the mismatch. So Lisa held a team meeting to discuss the problem, but only with people who were already aware of the situation. She thanked them for their efforts and reminded them, they need to treat the situation ethically and be respectful. They're not to share what they've discovered until management could investigate. Lisa's responsibility ethic led her to go to her manager to report the problem. Fortunately, her manager took it very seriously. He asked Lisa lots of good questions and told her to halt the data verification process until the board had an opportunity to evaluate the situation. Her manager then said, "Tell the team that the project budget has been cut, therefore, the project is temporarily on hold." Lisa was uncomfortable about not being truthful with the team. She wanted to be respectful to management to allow them to review the situation, and she wants to be honest and transparent with the team. However, doing so presents a challenge as the misreported benefits information should not become public knowledge until verified. This is a very difficult situation. The key, however, is not to act contrary to an ethical standard. In this case, it means placing one ethical standard above another until the investigation is completed. Lisa told her whole team the project was on hold while the management team discussed some anomalies identified in the data verification process. This approach supported the ethical standards for respect and responsibility for the management team and the employees as a whole. Once management determined how they would correct the benefits information, the project resumed and the whole situation was openly shared, supporting the need for honesty and transparency.