Business Ethics in a Digital World: A 360 Perspective

Introduction

The digital era has produced novel technologies, created a whole new socio-economic ecosystem, triggered new legal and regulatory requirements, gave birth to a new global workforce, redefined competitive advantage, shifted the risks and rewards balance, and has offered us new opportunities.

We are currently experiencing the 4th industrial revolution and are likely entering the 5th. Although this transition will offer exciting opportunities and will likely have a profound global transformative impact it will likely exacerbate current digital ethics challenges and create new ones we never envisioned before.

Business Ethics in the digital era poses some of the more complex and nuanced challenges and several publications have highlighted the wide range of ethical questions that remain to be answered in addition to a whole new set of ethical challenges that will arise while we leap into the next industrial revolution.

Blending boundaries between physical, digital and biological worlds will likely continue at an exponential pace with technologies such as AI, IoT, 6G or next generation computing having the potential to reshape, recalibrate or disrupt our society and the global economy.

Leaders that wish to be prepared for this leap into the 5th industrial revolution and successful in managing a new digitalized hyperconnected global workforce will be required to display a complex armamentarium of novel skills, such as technological fluency, embracing of design thinking methodology and mastery of applied digital ethics. It used to be sufficient to be a “tech savvy” leader, however with the current exponential advancements of a variety of modern technologies it is imperative for business leaders to have not only a higher degree of technical acumen in order but also emotional intelligence, lead with purpose and embrace ethics in order to remain competitive, as well as to ensure long term sustainability for their companies. Additionally, with the increase in consumer-centricity and a broader acceptance of technology-as-a-service business models current leaders would be advised to accept and manage change and be willing to disrupt themselves in order to avoid being disrupted by others. Digital data governance, proactive ethics- and compliance programs, ESG-consciousness and a focus on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are becoming an expectation for the new generation of leaders. Versatility in foundational ethical concepts and willingness to adopt complex ethics frameworks at every step of technological deployments are an imperative in this new business environment defined by a high degree of digitalization, virtualization and by intelligent automation of business processes.

There is an ongoing debate about the responsibilities of the business community and the incentives or mandates required to enforce these. We must balance moral theories with the practical corporate social responsibility. It is incumbent upon us a society to rethink how those moral theories can be applied mindfully and efficiently in this digital era.

Complex digital ethics framework include an ethical and digital risk analysis, a set of tools that can be deployed at various stages and in different layers of the business processes, establishing and monitoring digital ethics implementations via Key Performance Indicators, as well as building a culture of digital ethics while embracing an ongoing quality improvement mindset. Business leaders usually struggle with deployment of these frameworks due to a lack of digital ethics literacy and due to a failure to harmonize with other key organizational units such as Compliance, Human Resources, Marketing to only mention a few.

There continue to be many myths related to ethics which are only exacerbated when aiming to address digital ethics. Furthermore, we continue to encounter a profound misunderstanding about the impact of digital ethics on all aspects of an organizational ecosystem. Last but not least, we have observed ongoing resistance from some business leaders to embrace a proactive approach and they seem to continue to prefer a reactive crisis mitigating approach to ethics breaches.

A best in class cyber-ethics program likely represents one of the major drivers of success when operationalizing proactive digital ethics frameworks. More often than not cybersecurity and ethics are managed in silos and therefore offer the opportunity for cyberattacks or privacy breaches. A state of the art comprehensive digital ethics program must always include a robust cyber-ethics component and be fully integrated or harmonized with the organizational cyber-security systems.