Ethics of Big Data: Balancing Risk and Innovation

What are your organizations policies for generating and using huge datasets full of personal information? This book examines ethical questions raised by the big data phenomenon, and explains why enterprises need to reconsider business decisions concerning privacy and identity. Authors Kord Davis and Doug Patterson provide methods and techniques to help your business engage in a transparent and productive ethical inquiry into your current data practices.

Both individuals and organizations have legitimate interests in understanding how data is handled. Your use of data can directly affect brand quality and revenue—as Target, Apple, Netflix, and dozens of other companies have discovered. With this book, youll learn how to align your actions with explicit company values and preserve the trust of customers, partners, and stakeholders.

• Review your data-handling practices and examine whether they reflect core organizational values
• Express coherent and consistent positions on your organizations use of big data
• Define tactical plans to close gaps between values and practices—and discover how to maintain alignment as conditions change over time
• Maintain a balance between the benefits of innovation and the risks of unintended consequences

This book contains a framework for productive discussion and thinking about ethics and Big Data in business environments.

With the increasing size and scope of information that Big Data technologies can provide business, maintaining an ethical practice benefits from a common framework of understanding and vocabulary for discussing questions about coherent and consistent practices.

A framework provides you with a set of conceptual terms and tools that help decision-markers to engage difficult questions the expanding role Big Data plays in an increasing variety of products and services. The approach is to develop a set of terms and concepts, consider ethical principles useful in meaningful business discussions, and then explore and compare several overall views on data handling to help inform the development of an ethics-based data strategy.

The focus is to enhance effective decision-making in business rather than legislate what ought to be done with data. In this book, you will learn methods and techniques to facilitate rigorous, productive internal discussion, and express coherent and consistent positions on your organization's perspective on the use of Big Data in commerce.

Kord Davis is a former Principal Consultant with Cap Gemini and has spent nearly 20 years providing business strategy, analysis, and technical consulting to over 100 organizations of all sizes including: Autotask, Microsoft, Intel, Sisters of Mercy Healthcare, Nike, Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), Northwest Energy Alliance (NEEA), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Western Digital, Fluke, Merix, Roadway Express, and Gardenburger. Integrating a professional background in telecommunications and an academic background in philosophy, he brings passionate curiosity, the rigor of analysis, and a love of how technology can help us do the things we really want to do better, faster, and easier. A formally trained workgroup facilitator, he holds a BA in Philosophy from Reed College and professional certifications in communication, systems modeling, and enterprise transformation.