With a view towards understanding why undesirable outcomes often arise in ICT projects, we draw attention to three aspects in this essay. First, we present several examples to show that incorporating an ethical framework in the design of an ICT system is not sufficient in itself, and that ethics need to guide the deployment and ongoing management of the projects as well. We present a framework that brings together the objectives, design, and deployment management of ICT projects as being shaped by a common underlying ethical system. Second, we argue that power-based equality should be incorporated as a key underlying ethical value in ICT projects, to ensure that the project does not reinforce inequalities in power relationships between the actors directly or indirectly associated with the project. We present a method to model ICT projects to make legible its influence on the power relationships between various actors in the ecosystem. Third, we discuss that the ethical values underlying any ICT project ultimately need to be upheld by the project teams, where certain factors like political ideologies or dispersed teams may affect the rigour with which these ethical values are followed. These three aspects of having an ethical underpinning to the design and management of ICT projects, the need for having a power-based equality principle for ICT projects, and the importance of socialization of the project teams, needs increasing attention in today's age of ICT platforms where millions and billions of users interact on the same platform but which are managed by only a few people.
Deep Dive into Ethical Underpinnings in the Design and Management of ICT Projects.
With a view towards understanding why undesirable outcomes often arise in ICT projects, we draw attention to three aspects in this essay. First, we present several examples to show that incorporating an ethical framework in the design of an ICT system is not sufficient in itself, and that ethics need to guide the deployment and ongoing management of the projects as well. We present a framework that brings together the objectives, design, and deployment management of ICT projects as being shaped by a common underlying ethical system. Second, we argue that power-based equality should be incorporated as a key underlying ethical value in ICT projects, to ensure that the project does not reinforce inequalities in power relationships between the actors directly or indirectly associated with the project. We present a method to model ICT projects to make legible its influence on the power relationships between various actors in the ecosystem. Third, we discuss that the ethical values underlyin
The optimism behind ICT projects being able to make the world a better place has visibly suffered a setback in recent times. In this essay, we try to answer the question of why this might be so, and suggest some conceptualization frameworks that can help build guidelines for ICT project designers and managers to ensure that responsible outcomes arise from ICTs.
The scepticism about the reliability of ICT projects to lead to positive outcomes is shared between both ICT4D and non-ICT4D projects. ICT4D projects, like most other development programmes, often start with a theory of change that will lead to certain development outcomes, then use a human-centred design approach to design the ICT elements, and finally deploy and iterate on the design through a series of pilots and scale-up phases. Non-ICT4D projects, that may be defined as those not conceived to primarily achieve some development objectives through a pre-determined theory of change, are not very different, and typically follow the same process of going from some objectives (even if not development oriented) to design and then to the deployment of these projects. Given the similarity in how these different types of projects are conceptualized and executed, the reasons for failure must be common too for both ICT4D and non-ICT4D projects, and the arguments in this essay may therefore be generalized to both.
Even with a high degree of forethought in defining the objectives and design of ICT projects, surprises however often seem to spring up during the deployment of these projects. For example, flexibilities designed into the ICTs for ease of use may could lead to misuse of the technologies and cause harm (eg. Facebook [1]), or inequalities in access to the technologies may manifest in skewed development outcomes (eg. digital gender divide [2]), or the technology selection may not be suited to the deployment context (eg. Aadhaar [3]). Many such problems also manifest slowly over time but the sooner they are identified and addressed, the better, because once the projects are scaled-up it becomes harder to change them, often due to cost considerations and vested interests that emerge for the continuation of the projects [4]. Methods like co-design and participatory design advocate for adequate pilot iterations and evaluation under diverse conditions so that such problems are recognized and strategies are developed to fix them before scaling the projects [5]. Since observations about the effects of the ICTs on development outcomes need a long-term evaluation though, and business or political imperatives may not favour slow and steady approaches, therefore such methods are typically unable to bring about strategic changes in most government and market-led projects. Methods like valuesensitive design take a pro-active approach by building certain well-defined values into the design itself so that chances for misuse or undesirable outcomes is minimized [6]. However, such methods may also create a false illusion of safety by design, by not emphasizing on the importance of valuesensitivity in the management of the deployment as well, ie. the need to deal with problems that will still arise despite extensive galvanization attempts made during the design phase.
Further, while rich literature exists for designing ICTs, such as [7,8,9], there is a paucity of studies about the management of ICT projects in terms of problems that arise during deployment and how to address them. Rich literature about deployment experiences does exist, such as [10,11,12], but it is mostly descriptive in terms of identifying the problems, not in terms of methodological approaches to find solutions to address the problems.
We make three arguments in this essay. First, we argue that managing the deployment of ICT projects deserves as much importance as their design, and that design alone cannot guarantee flawless deployment. Towards this, we propose a three-layer framework within which ICT projects can be conceptualized, starting with defining the objectives, then the design elements, and finally the deployment management strategies, with a clearly specified common ethical system underpinning all these three layers. The ethical system serves as a glue spanning all the layers, to resolve unforeseen problems or make choices or deal with uncertainty, which are likely to arise in practical situations right from framing the objectives to defining the design and building operating processes for managing deployments. The common ethical system brings consistency in resolving questions that might arise at any of the three layers.
Second, we identify several common patterns that lead to undesirable outcomes during the deployment phase. All these patterns interestingly seem to stem from how the power dynamics between actors involved in the ICT projects change as a result of introduction of the ICTs, and lead to creating new power inequalities or exacerbate existing ones. We suggest a framework
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