Business Intelligence Paper
The topics for these are outlined below.
Students will apply Bellaby’s (2014) Just Intelligence Principles along the Ladder of Escalation and evaluate the risks/harms involved within their recommended course of action. Students should be able to defend how course of action is balanced with just cause, authority, right intentions, last resort, proportionality, and discrimination.
The project topic include:
○ The Ethics of Competitive Intelligence and Information Privacy (Business Intelligence)
References and proper APA formatting are required. Presentations should begin with a comprehensive introduction of the problem and supporting literature. Students will then make realistic and actionable recommendations based on three main points of analysis of their choosing, and, when possible, discuss how they fall along Bellaby’s ladder of Escalation. Students may choose to apply a particular ethical theory (or several) to support their recommendations. The groups must discuss the risks and/or harms associated with each of their points of
analysis, as well as how these will need to be balanced with the Just Intelligence Principles. See * below for examples.
Students need to include how their recommendations will impact American individuals, communities, affected organizations, and the nation as a whole, as well as what the global implications might be.
The addition of diagrams and schematics are encouraged, particularly those that include a visual depiction of where the group’s course of action might fall along the Ladder of Escalation (if the group is able to discuss potential types of intelligence utilized in the course of action).
For those working on The Ethics of Competitive Intelligence and Information Privacy in the field of Business Intelligence (Business Intelligence Team), one group may choose to discuss the question of how far we should go to gain the competitive edge versus crossing the lines of law and ethics. The group might use a particular ethical theory, or theories to support its conclusions. For one of their points of analysis (of the three), a group may decide to examine the use of dataveillance of a competing company to gain a competitive edge (I’m not saying this is morally
justifiable…I’m simply giving an example for you to try to defend if your group sees value in it). The group would then need to discuss what type of information they’d be collecting (open, personal, or intimate) through the use of dataveillance (and why) and where it would fall along Bellaby’s Ladder of Escalation. The group would then likely discuss the potential harms to employees, customers, the company, and the competing company, as well as the societal impacts of this type of intelligence collection. Finally, the group would discuss how the use of
dataveillance in this manner would be balanced with each of the Just Intelligence Principles (in this case, it might not be possible to balance it since a company’s interests can arguably never be justified along the lines of “Just Cause.”). The group would need to do the same work for the other two points of analysis and then sum up their recommended courses of action in a comprehensive conclusion.
