Internet resources to help Australian ICT professionals identify and solve ethical challenges

ICT professionals need a way to understand the ethical challenges they face in the workplace. Having first identified common workplace challenges through an industry survey with 2,315 respondents, those challenges were further explored, as were solutions to them, through interviews with 43 participants in six Australian capital cities. Findings from the quantitative survey were consistent with the findings from the qualitative interviews. That led to the identification of common categories of ethical challenges and strategies for solving them. Common unethical behaviours in the ICT workplace were also identified. The findings to date suggest that internal strategies are more effective in dealing with ethical workplace issues compared to external strategies. Further research is underway to clarify how those strategies can best be presented in an Internet resource, and the proactive steps that can be taken to create work environments that mitigate against unethical behaviours.