Foresight for a responsible future with ICT

M. Lynne Markus () and Kevin Mentzer ()
Additional contact information
M. Lynne Markus: Bentley University
Kevin Mentzer: Bentley University

Information Systems Frontiers, 2014, vol. 16, issue 3, No 3, 353-368

Abstract: Abstract The ACM Code of Ethics asserts that computing professionals have an ethical responsibility to minimize the negative consequences of information and communication technologies (ICT). Negative consequences are rarely intended, but they can often be foreseen with careful sociotechnical analysis in advance of system building. Motivated by an interest in extremely complex sociotechnical contexts (e.g., mortgage lending and automated trading) where ICT appears to be having negative consequences in addition to many benefits, this paper identifies and evaluates future-oriented problem analysis and solution design tools in three potentially relevant literatures: 1) ICT ethics, 2) environmental sustainability, and 3) technology hazards. Several promising future-oriented technology analysis techniques (e.g., anticipatory technology ethics, technology roadmapping, morphological analysis, and control structure analysis) were found and are discussed in this paper, but much work remains to be done to customize them, integrate them, and codify them for use in education and high-quality IS research on very complex sociotechnical contexts like the global financial network.

Keywords: Future-oriented technology analysis methods; Negative consequences of information and communication technologies (ICT); ICT ethics; Technology roadmapping; Technology transition studies; Technology hazards; Morphological analysis; Sociotechnical systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10796-013-9479-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:infosf:v:16:y:2014:i:3:d:10.1007_s10796-013-9479-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10796

DOI: 10.1007/s10796-013-9479-9

Access Statistics for this article

Information Systems Frontiers is currently edited by Ram Ramesh and Raghav Rao

More articles in Information Systems Frontiers from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().