IT Professionals’ Experience of Ethics and its Implications for IT Education

This research is aimed at developing a framework for preparing and supporting IT professionals as they practice ethics in a complex environment. It complements other research, by focussing on professionals’ own experience and by exploring this experience in depth. Variation Theory and Phenomenography form the basis for this project – eliciting and representing the relationship between IT professionals and the object of their experience, ethics. Participants were invited to participate, based on a ‘Model of Evolving IT’ which maps the IT space along an information-technology continuum and an artefact developer-artefact user continuum. Preliminary analysis has revealed two groups of experiences of ethics, one group defined by the proximity of the beneficiaries and the other group defined by the degree of personal ownership of responsibility. It is anticipated that the result will be a proposal for IT professional ethics formation and support, relevant to professional development and tertiary education.