AUTHOR
Marcus Breen

ABSTRACT

Prevailing views of the policy processes associated with the Internet vary dramatically and are generally untheorized. By adopting Public Interest Theory, the examination of Information Technology policy and its implementation in relation to the Internet can be undertaken. Public interest theory maintains that universal service should be a government policy priority in constructing local, regional, national and global infrastructures. Yet some evidence suggests that the public Internet is developing more slowly and in isolation from private systems and networks. With Intranets expanding alongside private use of the Internet, major reconfigurations of I.T. are taking place, which may include no constituents of Public Interest. Two I.T. models are developing, creating a significant challenge to Public Interest Theory, users and ethicists.

This paper will use Public Interest Theory to discuss two approaches to Government Policy and the Internet:

1. Industry Model;
2. Government Policy Model.

Model 1: Vertical Influence – Industry Model The cyber-elite in the industry driven model offers a tiered perspective of the science-technology-business nexus which is dominating US I.T. activity. This model could be characterized as the top down approach. Implications flowing from this approach are that the market has been perceived by the cyber-elite to exist at three levels: the I.T. Public; the US. Public; the Global Public. The meaning of universal service and the public interest is problematic and increasingly secondary.

Model 2: Horizontal Coordination – Government Policy Model Here, interests associated with the creative, Government and academic sectors are not treated as relegated participants in I.T. The alignment of the tiers differ considerably in this model from the Industry Model. Government-industry-technology and creative sectors share a partnership in national and global activities. Academic and science concerns are closely related yet problematic. The relationships speak to and for the public through I.T., communications and artistic policy statements, closely associated with consultative policy formulation. Public benefit is considered a localized, national, yet contestable goal, linked directly to universal service obligations.

Knowledge of these two models of Government policy provide insights into the approaches to Internet and Communications Policy. Public interest theory may sensitize policy makers to the constituents of the policy process. The paper will make a clear distinction between the public threshold of universal access to communication technologies in the US, compared with an example from Victoria, Australia.

Both models recognize public interest and the responsibility of Governments and related authorities to accept their policy advocacy function. The paper will describe differences in the approach taken by Governments to these models and the ethical dilemmas arising.

The paper will argue that limits to growth and universal service are prevalent within the Industry model, where the US government has minimized policy activity in response to industry pressure. In Australia, the partnership between levels of activity offers greater public interest outcomes.

AUTHOR
Andy Bissett and Geraldine Shipton

ABSTRACT

Some sensitive computer installations are attacked as many as 250,000 times per year. Many of these attacks are in the form of computer viruses; in fact it is claimed that 90 per cent of companies experience a virus attack each month. The construction and propagation of computer viruses is clearly a highly unethical practice. The main effect of a virus is to disrupt and deny the resources of a computer or computer system to the people using it. This may result in considerable if not complete loss of work, and can have extreme emotional and financial consequences, or even safety or political consequences. Even where a computer system can be made immune to virus attack, this can only be done at the expense of an extra effort. This effort incurs penalties of time, cost, and, usually, of making the computer system harder to use.

Hundreds of viruses have been launched, and many more continue to be conceived and released, for it is generally held that there is no completely secure defence against them. However, once a virus has been identified then a means of combating it may be formulated, so an extensive and useful literature exists concerning the technical means of virus prevention, detection and disinfection. By contrast, in this paper we consider the motivation behind the invention and release of computer viruses. It is interesting and worthwhile to do so, given the scale and permanence of the problem.

We briefly survey the different types of virus. Different kinds of viruses will have different ‘aims’ and effects. The same virus can have different effects on different kinds of computer systems. The intent behind a virus and the actual effect it will have may be disparate. These issues are evaluated and discussed. Next we examine and discuss possible conscious motivations: these include political; ethical; commercial; and malicious. However, the paper is also concerned with unconscious motivations and goes on to look at possible meanings for these disruptive activities from within a psychodynamic framework which draws on the work of Melanie Klein. The virus maker finds his activities useful in coping with unresolved issues such as: competition and rivalry; inability to form intimate attachments; the desire to control and disturb other people; envy. There may also be more playful aspects to this subversive behaviour which may result in a creative contribution to computing knowledge. The paper is also concerned to understand the relationship of virus making to gender. The paper draws upon previously published case studies of viruses and their makers in order to furnish material for these discussions.

We conclude that virus creation means different things for different perpetrators, but that generally it is a destructive act aimed at dismantling what is apparently ‘whole’. This reflects the reality that life constantly contains processes of destruction as well as creation. Paradoxically, the orderly, constructed world becomes stronger through the process of learning and defending against each new virus, in mimicry of the biological world. In other words, immunity is eventually acquired.

It may be the case that virus making is a natural but undesirable corollary to legitimate computer usage.

AUTHOR
Frans A.J. Birrer

ABSTRACT

Our possibilities to influence the development and use of technology in the workplace (as well as that of technology in general) are very much determined by the degree to which we are able to conceptually frame them in a productive way. If we start from a notion of technology that allows little opportunities for influence, we will indeed have little direct influence; but if we start from a notion that is overoptimistic concerning possibilities for steering, our effective control will be small too.

Traditionally, technology has been conceived as a neutral instrument. By implication, (1) the use of technology was supposed to be strictly distinguishable from technology as such, and (2) an essentially free choice was assumed with respect to how technology will be used. These premises have been deservedly criticised by recent research streams. A first attack pictures technology as ‘socially constructed’ : it is the embedding in social processes that drives the development and application of technology, and technology cannot be neatly separated from its social context. Second, such underlying social processes are often seen as a form of ‘selforganisation’, i.e., they have their own dynamics that cannot be steered in arbitrary directions. Useful as these criticisms have been in modifying a too optimistic view concerning the degree to which the development and application of technology are open to direct control, they have also accentuated an unresolved dichotomy : at one side we have the forms of determinism – in which the driving force now is no longer some mythological technology as such, but the social processes that shape technology-, at the other side we find speculations about the potential benefits of technology that simply forget to ask seriously whether these beneficial developments are likely to realise.

This dilemma asks for a new approach, that is able to integrate various aspects without reifying one at the expense of all the others. For this purpose, the framework of ‘constructive realism’, as developed by the author, will be introduced. In contradistinction to the approaches mentioned above, it does not merely try to describe developments and processes, it has an explicit normative edge as well. Technology is seen as a ‘canalization’ of social processes : new technical possibilities ‘invite’ new flows in the existing social system (i.e., what is an ‘invitation’ depends upon the present social system). The crucial matter however is to identify those ‘invitations’ that might lead to socially unacceptable consequences, and find out how the social processes can be modified such that these undesirable tendencies do not occur. This general perspective will be applied to IT in the workplace. In particular, it will be argued that worldwide tendencies and ideologies like globalisation, deregulation and liberalisation cannot be ignored : proposals that run against these tendencies (and against the drives behind these tendencies) are not likely to succeed, and if this forces us into options we do not want, we have to ask ourselves also how to countervail those undesirable tendencies themselves. Instead of leaving the global perspective implicit, and conceiving those broader issues purely as external constraints, computer experts should explicitly deal with these questions, and see them as part of their social responsibility.

AUTHOR
Laure Berti and David Graveleau

ABSTRACT

Blowed out by the ever-widening explosion of networked documents, casual users and business executives are inevitably confronted with the difficulty in determining the value of on-line information. Clearly, despite their flexible accessibility and inherent capability of being manipulated by desktop, not all this mass of material is worth accessing and reading, the reasons for this disappointing state of affairs are manyfolds:

• the extreme but omnipresent context of retrieval is overinformation and eventually disinformation,
• many on-line databases are plagued with erroneous data,
• data usually do not meet users’ needs (context mismatch),
• collected data are multi-source but their future use doesn’t necessarlycorrespond to the prescribed one,
• contextual meta-information are lost in most cases.

In the database and information systems context, a body of research has layed much emphasis on system quality engineering and software quality metrics, but a more system-introspective trend of research focuses on the quality of data as an information product [1]. In its formative stage, Data Quality research is emerging with methodologies, frameworks for conceptual specifications, techniques and tools to fight against the costly data non-quality problem in information systems [3] [4] [2].

In this paper, we propose, as a useful starting point, to set research in Information Technologies back in context with a special attention payed to data quality and on-line Information value. We will define the basic concepts such as value of information (related to both generation context and final use context), consistancy, accuracy, reliability and relevance of information, we considered as intrinsic dimensions of data quality. Meta-information about the contexts of information extraction and consumption are crucial and should be captured with data. The major problem is to explicilty represent and store in databases or information systems the informal aspect of information (which orientates the interpretation) and, more precisely, the notion of “information performance” ; that is, its capability to cause effects and reactions on the information receiver (e. g. he/she is sceptic or convinced)*. The concepts of Overinformation and Disinformation will then be discussed. These aspects of on-line information quality (or non-quality) will be presented in the way they are used for filtering or value-adding information available electronically in Competitive Intelligence applications.

The sheer scale of the Web activities and the volume of web-based information systems forcibly presents the Internet community with several urgent and nagging questions concerning the value of data and the performance of information we’ll attempt to answer in the perspective of content selection and certification [5] [6] [7]:

• what are + good quality ; on-line information?
• among the www-documents published on-line, some are perfectly irrelevant, can a standard for exclusion of non-relevant information and information sources be proposed?
• how can the notion of quality of data be introduced, formalized, and estimated for filtering non-relevant information or value-added information in a commonly accepted standard?
• how can the data consumers can capture the value of information and mesure it as an asset ? Without such measures it is difficult to create meaningful performance metrics of data quality relatively to user’s requirements and identify ways to take advantage of and track it. The ability to quantify and measure an asset is an important component of making that asset truly + strategic ; in the context of Technological Watch.

In integrating more contextual meta-information and tagging information quality, we attempt to create value-added data from on-line information we collect on the Web. Data manufacturing encouraged us to seek out cross-disciplinary analogies we’ll present.

AUTHOR
Douglas W. Barbin

ABSTRACT

What used to encompass just financial statement auditing has expanded to reports on internal control, information risk assessment, regulatory compliance auditing, and most recently, ethics and privacy auditing. As a result, accountants are no longer the only parties involved. Audits of today’s complex business environment require specially trained persons in fields ranging from computer technology to law enforcement to management science and philosophy. In the sixteenth century, “Auditing . . . was designed to verify the honesty of persons charged with fiscal responsibilities.” It is important to note that while the scope and methodology of the audit have changed, its principle and role in society have not.

Electronic commerce poses especially interesting and critical challenges for auditing. Such challenges include the issue of security and privacy within electronic commerce, public trust of security and privacy, assurance of security and privacy, and the interrelationships among the three. What can auditors do to provide integrity to the dynamic and uncertain environment of electronic commerce in the global marketplace? How can they tackle issues ranging from encryption to mandatory privacy standards for commerce, such as those established in the European Union?

The primary obstacle hindering electronic commerce is the consumers and specifically, their confidence. The public is very much aware of the risks associated with electronic commerce and is extremely skeptical. Consumers need reasonable assurance of the integrity of the systems. They are constantly exposed to stories in the media of hackers, Cyber-terrorists, and violations of their privacy. The assurances of a company-provider are not good enough. An independent review by persons or a company with a trusted reputation, using their cumulative knowledge of the industry and relevant privacy standards, can provide reasonable assurance of integrity of the system as a whole. The auditor, (be it an accountant, a security specialist, a computer programmer, or an expert in privacy issues), must recognize the fluid environment in which the Internet exists. The auditor must be careful in establishing standards and benchmarks, for they could be outdated months later. An effective audit would involve continuous review of a company’s information systems and policies with respect to privacy and security as well as compliance with any established codes. For instance with the European Union’s privacy standards, it would be necessary to understand the rules of compliance while at the same time recognizing changes in legal interpretations and technological advances. It is important to view the audit less as a test and more of a race; a race to beat the very people and events threatening the business of electronic commerce.

Regardless of changes in scope and methodology, the objective of an audit comes down to providing integrity in a world of uncertainty. The use of an independent auditor in the field of electronic commerce can provide for that integrity and boost consumer confidence within the global “Cyber”-market. Note: Possible cases studies could include the emergence of Information Systems Risk Management, Amazon.com, “Cyber”-Malls, and examples of multi-domestic and global companies expanding through cyber-space.

AUTHOR
Mario Arias-Oliva

ABSTRACT

The information society has arrived, creating a new technological and business environment. The technological framework is based on information and communication technologies, which are constantly increasing capacity and decreasing cost. Global markets, shorter product life cycle, complexity and fast change characterised the business environment. In such new conditions, organisations must adapt to new changing conditions. In order to fit, we propose two main factors that should be considered in organisations if they are to continue operating in new circumstances, strategy and organisation form or structure. Firms should look for new strategies to cope with new conditions. The information technologies provide a fundamental instrument for satisfying new strategic demands. Likewise, if new strategies are developed and new environments adapted to, all aspects of traditional forms of organisations must be changed, like structure, systems, management styles, cultures, skills, etc. There are some new organisational forms based mainly on information technology: Internet, LAN’s, GroupWare, Mobil telecommunications, etc. Some of these new forms, like networked organisation, the task team based organisation, the management matrix organisation, or the lifelong learning organisation, will be described in this paper, taking into consideration the social dimensions that those changes will get on persons, organisations and society.