Ethics and responsibility
The moral compass of the organisation and its compliance with the law have always co-existed with the purpose of organisations. We may know this compass as company’s values, leadership tone, employees’ conduct, and brand perception. So why is ethical and responsible use of data become such a prominent concern now? Wasn’t it there before? Availability of data, cloud computing, and accessibility of AI have brought to light that the pursuit of profit is too tempting. Data leaders now need to "show" through data how ethical, compliant, and sustainable the organisation really is. To do that, data leaders may need a more candid partnership with the board, i.e. an open conversation about the limitations of data - data is not undisputed fact and may not even be a good representation of reality.
Image by Mario Aranda from Pixabay
As a leader, I often reflect on the many layers of data interpretation and corrections that exist between a fact and a decision. Trust in a report requires trust in data, processes, controls, and people, which in turn depend on increasingly layered platforms and technologies. We are much more accomplished in building, maintaining and showing lineage of data elements with the tools of our disposal now compared to say, twenty years ago. But system complexity has also grown at the same time, forcing leaders to make “risk based” decisions about where to focus their control efforts. Hence the term critical processes. But what is truly critical now?
As public companies need to disclose more about their operations over time as a means to evidence their environmental, social, and governance commitments, I would argue that the quality and lineage of data has to be evidenced for the entire operation. Is this what is really changing? Have efforts to improve workforce diversity and responsible sourcing always been there, but never backed up by data? Or is the legal need for transparency actually improving corporate decision-making? As data professionals, we must remind ourselves of this stark warning by Ronald H. Coase, British economist:
“Torture the data long enough, and it will confess to anything.”
With greater accessibility of data and power to analyse it, human behaviour has been decoded (Yuval Harari, Homo Deus) – or at least decoded enough for a high-fidelity proxy to drive business outcomes. So, now we finally arrive at the organisation’s moral compass: just because something is legal, it doesn’t make it ethical. Ethic is a fluid and subjective set of values that depend on individuals’ or societies’ unique backgrounds.
The moral compass of the organisation and its compliance with the law have always co-existed with, and to a great extent constrained, the objective of the system. In financial services, after aggregating many disparate goals, the objective of the system can arguably be reduced to maximising profit – in the short term (performance incentives, shareholder returns) and the long term (with business longevity, individuals also expect future bonuses). Company’s values aligned with its suppliers and partners, leadership tone, employees’ conduct, and brand perception are all intertwined with how the objective is achieved. Availability of data, compute power, and open-source AI models have changed the rules of the profit game: if your business doesn’t take advantage of these opportunities to attain higher engagement, customer value, personalisation, or operational efficiency, your competitor will... maybe. To make sure the organisation’s moral compass is still working, data leaders now need to "show" how ethical, compliant, and sustainable the organisation really is.
Data leaders can only demonstrate those attributes with strong and candid partnership with the board through open conversations about the limitations of data - data is not undisputed fact and may not even be a good representation of reality. Blind faith in data is dangerous.
Image by Tung Nguyen from Pixabay
During the French Revolution, the Committee of Public Safety published the following as part of its 8 May 1793’s Plan of Work, Surveillance, and Correspondence:
“They [the representatives of the Convention] must understand that a great responsibility is the inseparable result of a great power”
(Plan de travail, de surveillance et de correspondance: “Ils doivent envisager qu'une grande responsabilité est la suite inséparable d'un grand pouvoir”)
This may have been misattributed to Voltaire at some point. In my infinite ignorance, before doing this research, I thought it was a Marvel’s Spider-Man original – “With great power comes great responsibility!” This should be the motto for all of us data leaders when providing insights from data to the businesses we support. This is our profession’s ethical duty.