PROFESSIONALISM IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

WEEK 9

In today’s fast paced environment the need to adapt to outside circumstances is ever increasing. Adaptability will help you to create information systems that will get you the information you need to stay competitive. Parallel to the rapid development of Information Technology is uprising of certain ethical and professional issues as well as social implications that raises many professionalism questions of IT people and has made a big impact not only the way people around the globe communicate but also, it opens a wide door to information. Internet gave people the freedom to do, find and share a lot of things and information in the web. It is like going inside a global grocery store where everything you wanted and needed are there, all you have to do is put it inside your cart. Consequently, this freedom became the key for emergence of numerous ethical issues and made different cultures collide. However, IT professionals like any others, need to act in a professional way to avoid these collisions.

An IT practitioner needs to have equity. Equity simply means being fair with others and to act fair is to act ethical. Equity directly relates to the intellectual property rights which according to Justin Hughes, an American law professor is characterized as “nonphysical property that is a product of cognitive processes and whose value is based upon some idea or collection of ideas.” Intellectual Property is legally protected by copyright, patents, trademarks, trade secrets and design rights. One common violation of this right is the rampant uploading or downloading an electronic files through peer-to-peer sharing (P2P) network and mostly this is without the permission of the original author. Act likes software piracy is also unprofessional.

Second is privacy. Something that intrudes the privacy of others is considered unethical. These include accessing one’s email account, records and personal information such as credit card number, address, etc.



There are companies who practice monitoring of both personal and business emails, as well as internet usage of their employees. A number of office workers are accessing and using personal email account for business and personal reasons. This often times leads to information leakage and expose the company to unstable situations. Some also collect this information and sell to companies who advertise their products through spam mails. They send un necessary emails to our personal emails accounts. Hacking is also another issue that many IT practitioners are doing to hack information about people, companies etc. This is unprofessional behavior.

Lastly, IT professionals need to be honest is honesty which refers to acting with integrity. Generally, everyone knows and can distinguish what is right from wrong. But, not everyone can act honestly at all times. Even with the creation of company conduct code or policy, it cannot stop someone in doing unethical or dishonest habits in the workplace for honesty is something intrinsic. These are common unethical and unprofessional business habits and serves as current challenges of most companies. IT professionals need to be honest when placing software for free download where many put viruses a program that affects the normal functioning of a computer. This virus can damage some important files and lead to vital information loss.

An IT professional should act professionally and never use his IT skills badly or to engage in any unethical act. This will make him have the dignity of being called a professional as well as not being unjust to others. One is encouraged to concentrate more on inventions and innovations that can help people in many ways. Therefore being a professional is not only having the IT skills but also the ability of one to act ethically and professionally.

ADAPTABILITY

The ability to adapt to frequent changes in the IT sector has emerged as a new paradigm for successful IT practitioners and companies operations. An IT professional should have all the required and extra skills in his field to be able to cope up with the adaptability that involves changes in every day to day basis. Every day there is a new software in the market, a new device and new trends. An IT professional should be able to cope up with this change through updating himself with the current trends.

Business change is one of the most outstanding and most pervasive qualities of global economies. There has been some consideration of business change itself, but less emphasis has been on studying the outcomes of this change with regard to information technology (IT) and its interrelation. Organizational change requires the information systems architecture of an organization to adjust too to be able to adapt to changes in the IT sector. The so called digital market which involves intense IT application, needs IT professionals to combat themselves with all the technology in the field to be able to perform accurately and effectively.

IT professionals also need to adapt to the way of handling IT project complexity so as to ensure smooth running of projects. A professional needs to be aware of all the changes occurring in the external markets as well as internally within the organization so as to be able to handle the complexity easily without affecting the business and the field at large. Complexity issues can be societal, organizational, and technological as well as software. Also one important feature is the enterprise architecture of the business that determines how the business operates.

IT professionals also need to be very knowledgeable in their respective fields to enable them to handle IT matters easily. An undergraduate degree is not enough, with the current trends in the knowledge fields where more and more post graduates studies are facilitated, one needs to be able to acquire all the necessary skills and not only theories. In other words there is a need for a CS professional to know more about networking and vice versa. By doing so, it will make practitioners adapt to their respective fields easily and be able to make decisions as well as handle various matters easily.




References:


Andresen, K., Gronau, N., Schmid, S. (2005): Ableitung von IT-Strategien durch Bestimmung der
notwendigen Wandlungsfähigkeit von Informationssystemarchitekturen.

http://www3.gartner.com/Init,