Code of Ethics Can Guide Responsible Data Use

Katherine Noyes
The Wall Street Journal
Originally posted September 26, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Associated with these exploding data volumes are plenty of practical challenges to overcome—storage, networking, and security, to name just a few—but far less straightforward are the serious ethical concerns. Data may promise untold opportunity to solve some of the largest problems facing humanity today, but it also has the potential to cause great harm due to human negligence, naivety, and deliberate malfeasance, Patil pointed out. From data breaches to accidents caused by self-driving vehicles to algorithms that incorporate racial biases, “we must expect to see the harm from data increase.”

Health care data may be particularly fraught with challenges. “MRIs and countless other data elements are all digitized, and that data is fragmented across thousands of databases with no easy way to bring it together,” Patil said. “That prevents patients’ access to data and research.” Meanwhile, even as clinical trials and numerous other sources continually supplement data volumes, women and minorities remain chronically underrepresented in many such studies. “We have to reboot and rebuild this whole system,” Patil said.

What the world of technology and data science needs is a code of ethics—a set of principles, akin to the Hippocratic Oath, that guides practitioners’ uses of data going forward, Patil suggested. “Data is a force multiplier that offers tremendous opportunity for change and transformation,” he explained, “but if we don’t do it right, the implications will be far worse than we can appreciate, in all sorts of ways.”

The info is here.

4 Ways Lying Becomes the Norm at a Company

Ron Carucci
Harvard Business Review
Originally published February 15, 2019

Many of the corporate scandals in the past several years — think Volkswagen or Wells Fargo — have been cases of wide-scale dishonesty. It’s hard to fathom how lying and deceit permeated these organizations. Some researchers point to group decision-making processes or psychological traps that snare leaders into justification of unethical choices. Certainly those factors are at play, but they largely explain dishonest behavior at an individual level and I wondered about systemic factors that might influence whether or not people in organizations distort or withhold the truth from one another.

This is what my team set out to understand through a 15-year longitudinal study. We analyzed 3,200 interviews that were conducted as part of 210 organizational assessments to see whether there were factors that predicted whether or not people inside a company will be honest. Our research yielded four factors — not individual character traits, but organizational issues — that played a role. The good news is that these factors are completely within a corporation’s control and improving them can make your company more honest, and help avert the reputation and financial disasters that dishonesty can lead to.

The stakes here are high. Accenture’s Competitive Agility Index — a 7,000-company, 20-industry analysis, for the first time tangibly quantified how a decline in stakeholder trust impacts a company’s financial performance. The analysis reveals more than half (54%) of companies on the index experienced a material drop in trust — from incidents such as product recalls, fraud, data breaches and c-suite missteps — which equates to a minimum of $180 billion in missed revenues. Worse, following a drop in trust, a company’s index score drops 2 points on average, negatively impacting revenue growth by 6% and EBITDA by 10% on average.

The info is here.