Chief Ethics Officer role, anyone?

With each passing day, data is getting entrenched deeper and deeper into our lives – from boardroom decisions to day-to-day operations. Responsible organizations will be proactive to ensure that data is sourced from known points of origin and more importantly used in ethical means, with no invasion of privacy or gray areas. One more role to add to the alphabet soup of designations will be the Chief Ethics Officer or a CEO, someone who is clear with the laws of the land and has passion with data.

The role of a CEO has come a long way from the ‘legal hat’ the role had to wear in its early days in the 1990s, when the ‘Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations’ or FSGO was passed. The role had to ensure that ethical policies and guidelines were defined and adhered to, by training employees and making it a part of the culture imbibed with integrity and moral values.

The early 2000’s brought the CEO’s focus back to the finance department with the passage of SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act), following accounting controversies such as the Enron scandal. The Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 brought in ‘consumer protection’ by emphasizing on transparency and accountability. With data getting deeply entrenched in business operations with easy passing day, the CEO can no longer miss ‘digitization’ across the enterprise to ensure that is fair to all stake holders – employees, customers, partners, vendors, shareholders and the broader society as a socially responsible organization.

As we undergo Digital Transformation, responsible organizations will not wait for a scandal to surface or for regulations to be put in place. The CEO will be accountable in ensuring that checks and balances are implemented as we undergo the metamorphosis to the ‘digital way’ of running businesses. The role will need ongoing collaboration with the CIO’s office and other business leaders starting from the boardroom.

Until emerging technologies such as advanced analytics and AI/ML establish themselves to become mature, not a day passes without controversies getting reported in the media. Ethics is reported as a top ranking areas of risk for AI adoption. Universities have started courses on this topic.

Whenever historical data is used to ‘train’ algorithms to take decisions autonomously, bias can creep in either knowingly or unknowingly. Amazon had to scrap its recruitment tool when it realized that it had developed a bias in its selection process. Research institute ‘AI Now’ spoke about the need for regulation in facial recognition, a relatively mature adoption of computer vision widely used for identification. Cambridge Analytica was a case of known misuse of data, when social media usage was allegedly used to influence voters. CEOs will need to design scam-proof decision making systems in such a way that bias is measurable, with means to gradually eliminate it to the least extent possible. These are generic issues.

Every industry will have its own challenges in ensuring the ethics, for known issues and unknown new ones that bubble up. The automotive industry has the ‘trolley problem’ – when an autonomous car has to decide between saving the driver or innocent pedestrians when an accident is inevitable. Organizations and universities should avoid bias in the selection process when they receive applications for a loan or for admission. Sourcing and procurement should avoid conflicts of interest in vendor selection to avoid any discrimination based on gender, age, race or other demographics.

The CEO’s job description will be clear. Implementing it will be the challenge. With the huge commoditization of data happening around us, CEOs should ensure that they know from where data flowing into the company is from and with what filtering. Number crunching done to the data using analytics, AI/ML should ensure that there is no bias. Decisions taken based on insights from the data should not be discriminatory and subject to audit to explain the rationale behind a decision anytime.

The CEO role will add one more term to alphabet soup of designations in the complex corporate world we live in today. But it will be one that cannot be overlooked as we continue in the journey of Digital Transformation. Until a new term is added to the CXO club, this CEO need not worry about meeting quarterly revenue targets. But one key, easy to measure KPI will be the number of visits to the courtroom - the lesser the better.

Note: All opinions and points-of-view expressed above are that of the author and do not represent that of any other individual or organization.

Image courtesy: onaeg news agency [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]