Analyse Alternative Ethical Solutions

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) is a framework created by Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) for information technology (IT) management and IT governance. It is a best practice framework and provides IT process controls and provides audit and compliance guidelines. It allows managers to bridge the gap between control requirements, technical issues and business risks. Its mission is to research, develop, publish and promote an authoritative, up-to-date, international set of generally accepted information technology control objectives for day-to-day use by business managers, IT professionals and assurance professionals. The COBIT framework was created with the main characteristics of being business-focused, process-oriented, controls-based and measurement-driven.

The COBIT framework is based on to provide the information that the organization needs to reach the organization’s objectives, the organization needs to invest in and manage IT resources using a structured process to provide the services that deliver the required organization information. Managing and controlling information is important in COBIT framework to ensure alignment to business requirements. To achieve the business objectives, information needs to be certain criteria, which COBIT refers to as business requirements for information. The information criteria may be defined as effectiveness, efficiency, confidentiality, integrity, availability, compliance and reliability. These information criteria helps for defining the business requirements, defining a set f generic business and IT goals provides a business-related and more refined basis for establishing business requirements and developing the metrics that allow measurement against these goals.

Process-oriented

COBIT defines IT activities in a generic process model within four domains.

Plan and Organise (PO) - Provides direction to solution delivery (AI) and service delivery (DS)

Acquire and Implement (AI) - Provides the solutions and passes them to be turned into services

Deliver and Support (DS) - Receives the solutions and makes them usable for end users

Monitor and Evaluate (ME) - Monitors all processes to ensure that the direction provided is followed

Control based

Control is defined as the policies, procedures, practices and organisational structures designed to provide reasonable assurance that business objectives will be achieved and undesired events will be prevented or detected and corrected. IT control objectives provide a complete set of high-level requirements to be considered by management for effective control of each IT process.

Measurement Driven

Enterprises need to measure where they are and where improvement is required, and implement a management tool kit to monitor this improvement.

COBIT deals with these issues by providing:

Maturity models to enable benchmarking and identification of necessary capability improvements

Performance goals and metrics for the IT processes, demonstrating how processes meet business and IT goals and are used for measuring internal process performance based on balanced scorecard principles

Activity goals for enabling effective process performance

The benefits of implementing COBIT framework over the IT department include:

Better alignment, based on a business focus

A view, understandable to management, of what IT does

Clear ownership and responsibilities, based on process orientation

Understanding amongst all executives, management and IT professionals based on a common language

Improves IT efficiency and effectiveness

Helps IT understand the needs of the business

Puts practices in place to meet the business needs as efficiently as possible

Ensures alignment of business and IT

Helps executives understand and manage IT investments throughout their life cycle.

A better understanding of how the business and IT can work together for successful delivery of IT initiatives

Improve the performance of the IT professionals

Optimization of cost

Reduced operational risk

More efficient and successful audits

Can get the trust between the business users and the IT service function

Task 2

Project management Strategy

Any organization involved with projects should have a strategy in place for how to select and proceed with each project. The project approach is dependent on the organisation’s priorities: Strategic or Organisational. It needs to balance long and short term needs.

In strategic management, knowledge of the right tools and techniques can help businesses solve critical problems and develop strategic plans.

Strategic management Techniques

Strategic management uses a company's mission to develop policies and procedures, which move the organization forward toward reaching goals. The strategic management techniques help the company plan and implement projects designed to align with the company mission. The techniques also allow the company to reevaluate projects to determine progress or obstacles that may prevent it from reaching its goals.

Many techniques and tools exist

Choices made are important; these should add value to process

The techniques and tools chosen are dependent on the priorities of the organization

Strategic priority will demand a differing approach to organisational priority

Examples

SWOT

Boston Consulting Group matrix (BCG)

Porter’s 5 Forces

Net Present Value Analysis (NPV)

Return on Investment (ROI)

Balanced Scorecard

Weighted Scoring Model

SWOT

A SWOT analysis is a useful technique for analyzing a firm's position in the market. A SWOT analysis considers the firm's internal strengths and weaknesses against external opportunities and threats. This can allow a firm to exploit opportunities using its strengths, while at the same time improving upon its weaknesses in order to avoid external threats.

Boston Consulting Group Matrix (BCG)

The Boston Consulting Group Matrix is the most common tool for performing a portfolio analysis. The BCG Matrix considers products and services according to two dimensions: market growth and relative market share. According to the BCG Matrix, products and services with high growth and high market share are the most desirable, while those with low growth and low market share are undesirable.

Porter’s 5 Forces

The five forces model is a technique for analyzing the attractiveness of a market. The model looks at the five forces that shape an industry: supplier bargaining power, customer bargaining power, the threat of new entrants, the threat of substitutes and the degree of industry rivalry. The ideal industry is one in which these forces are relatively low, meaning that there is little competition, buyers and suppliers cannot bargain and there are few threats from new entrants or substitutes.

Return on Investment (ROI)

It is used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. In purely economic terms, it is one way of considering profits in relation to capital invested. The purpose of the "return on investment" metric is to measure, per period, rates of return on money invested in an economic entity in order to decide whether or not to undertake an investment. ROI and related metrics provide a snapshot of profitability, adjusted for the size of the investment assets tied up in the enterprise. ROI is often compared to expected (or required) rates of return on money invested.

Balanced Scorecard

The balanced scorecard is a management accounting tool that has become popular in strategic management. The balanced scorecard is a method of evaluating a firm across a broad range of perspectives, specifically the financial, customer, internal business process, and learning and growth perspectives. The four perspectives can give a firm a better idea of the company's overall health than the financial perspective alone.

Task 3

Kallman & Grillo’s Ethical Framework

Steps in Kallman & Grillo’s Ethical Framework

Understand the situation

Identify the relevant facts. These facts might be ‘as much as possible, a neutral, logical exercise’. 

Which of these raises an ethical issue? Why? What is the potential harm?

List the stakeholders involved, who is affected by the action being analysed. A judgement must be made as to whether a stakeholder is important enough to be listed. There may also be a number of secondary stakeholders.

Identify key ethical issue

What is the issue? What action should be taken?

It is important to identify the major ethical issues, some of these issues are more important than others. It is necessary to ask whether someone was under an obligation or duty to have done or not done something.

Discover whether an ethical dilemma exists by applying the formal and informal guidelines.

Analyse alternative ethical solutions

What are the consequences?

If action is done, who, if anyone, will be harmed?

If action is not done, who, if anyone, will be harmed?

Make decision & implement action

Decide how to act and justify decision

Create an action plan and report to stakeholders

Document the findings

Make a defensible decision

List the specific steps needed to implement your defensible decision

Show how the major stakeholders are affected by these actions

What other long-term changes would help such problems in future

What should have been done or not done in the first place to avoid this dilemma.

Communicate between stakeholders

Applying the Kallman and Grillo’s Ethical framework

Understand the situation

Identify the facts -

The business concerns to outsource much of the IT function to be cost effective.

It needs to make the most of the existing workforce to be redundant.

Most of the employees are working together for a long time. Moreover their families and friends are important to me.

It can harm the company’s reputation.

Stakeholders involved in this project are

CEO, project manager, the existing IT professionals

Identify key ethical issue

Some unethical decisions can hurt other individuals, the organization we work for, or society. The ethical dilemma is – the business outsources to be cost effective and the existing workforce redundant

Analyse alternative ethical solutions

If the action is done, the IT professionals will be unemployed and the company is breakdown the reputation between the employer and employees.

If the action is not done, the company faces costly.

Make decision & implement action

Ethical decisions are not made with absolute certainty. Ethical decisions are made through judgement and by validation through a rational appeal to a number of principles. There is no unique correct solution to a moral dilemma. It is vital to creating a world in which we want to live.