The rising animosity towards the digital world is still going considerably unanswered as consumers and societies are being hit with data breaches, corporate scams, and various issues associated with new inventions.

While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic isn't helping and traditional policymakers are being cornered at their inability to keep up with the uncontrollable change in the tech industry.

This brings us to the guide of building ethical tech for your business.

How to build ethical tech?

The demand has forced companies to on board resources specifically for creating ethical practices, also termed as chief ethics officer.

Here are the practices you need to employ around your product development and deployment operations in order to ensure the psychological safety of both your brand and workforce.

Move beyond the typical, favorable outcomes

Often, lack of accountability is mostly the case at executive level, especially when we talk about malicious products and services. But decisions contributing to their making is mostly on engineers in the product development teams.

Consider examining some of the false advertising scandals involving hate speech, discrimination, or any kind of miscommitment affecting at the societal and user level, often the product teams weren't aware of their decision despite knowing the repercussions the product would be subjected to.

Usually, it's an unconscious decision through which a seemingly innocent design protrudes with the potential of bringing unwanted affects.

Understandably, tech developers are often biased on how their products will benefit the users. This is why developers need to employ tools that function beyond typical use cases and test results, but also extract details about the possible misfortunes, malfunctions, etc. such as discrimination, addiction, or even worse, like enabling extremists.

Tools like DotEveryone, EthicalOS, etc. are used by ethics personnel in the industry for the purpose.

It's not about reinventing the wheel

Besides identifying the red flags in the first step, it is equally important to elevate those issues at the right seniority level on consistent, transparent basis.

Which doesn't mean redefining the entire process from scratch. Apparently, related executives realized that rather than experimenting with a new process in the form of unneeded checkpoints, it is not worthy to burden an already tight product development cycle.

A good workaround is tailgating on phases that are already included in any product development process in domains like environmental sustainability, cybersecurity, and so on.

In doing so, typical, routine concerns can be voiced promptly, while more critical ones will be sent for an in-depth scrutiny.

Putting it simply on humane level, the concern is not only about making the product developer's life easier, but also strengthening the ethical review process.

Design for scale

As satisfying as it might seem to have an actual ethics resource on board solely hired to protect the company and its brand from any kind of internal and external harm. It is easier said than done.

The expectations and call to act as a powerful panacea for all the company's problems are very easy to fall short, regardless how big the ethics team gets.

The idea is to ask the ethics team to pick selected topics or prevailing company issues and dig deep for a thorough understanding on the root of the problems. In doing so, you're actually creating a standard roadmap on how to deal with a variety of complex products and the issues they bring along at launch, one of the many other crucial business proceedings.

Still, the methodology won't successfully scale if it is to be executed across all the departments in the company.

There are plenty of examples of companies with great ethical decision making like Woolworths, Costco, Allianz, to name a few.

All these names have one thing in common—hiring and training selected individuals as ambassadors or champions. These people will have more than the usual on their plate, making the teams more sensitive and proactive towards unasked influences and how to raise genuine concerns in a prompt manner.

The prime purpose of empowering resources on board is to instill contextual intelligence and credibility for mutual trust and respect among everyone on the floor.

Culture above all

You might have created and presented a killer design process, but if your workforce isn't motivated appropriately to follow, it will be nothing more than a routine email or a box-checking exercise which majority of us love to ignore.

Most of the times, engineers are expected to deploy products quick, unfortunately, that is what decides their performance evaluation. Hence, that's the culture we witness in tech companies worldwide.

Talking about hard incentives including promotions, bonuses, team expansion, etc., these incentives should tag along soft incentives as well.

For instance, how does your company celebrate the launch of a new product.

Commonly, such announcements are catered through a company-wide email or the all-hands meet.

At the same time, can you do anything similar in case a new product launch is halted, or stopped, due to an ethical concern raised.

Remember, employees today are smart enough to know the inclination of the company on the priorities and values set, and ethics executives can decode these cues to craft policies that go a long way in changing the company culture for good.

Let's face the fact, ethics is merely a vague concept, therefore, relevant experts need to bifurcate the dos and don'ts in real time, only then businesses can work towards accomplishing trust development goals on a holistic level.

How to facilitate data and AI ethics?

In this section, we're talking about artificial intelligence ethics, something that has been troubling the business owners and regulatory bodies ever since the technology's inception in the digital media.

The AI technology doesn't come with a one-size-fits-all philosophy, obviously, every tech company in each industry has its own purpose and vision for existence.

Hence, the data and AI ethics efforts must be directed to the custom needs of the business and its target audience and the region's regulatory obligations.

Apart from that, you can take some concrete measures towards building a scalable, customized data and AI ethics roadmap.

How can the current infrastructure use data and AI ethics?

It doesn't matter if you're providing professional ghostwriting services, running an IT firm, or even a grocery store next door, scrutinizing the business infrastructure is important, let alone incorporating data ethics.

Prior to everything, you need to leverage the power and authority of the existing infrastructure, i.e., data governance rulebook that dictates privacy, data, compliance, and similar risks.

This shall allow ground level professionals like product managers and owners to stand up and correspond their affairs to relevant stakeholders.

Thoughts!

The governance board has the power to decide how serious the workforce should consider tech based issues, be able to bridge the gap between senior level and general level data and AI strategy, and mitigate the risks from regulatory, legal, and reputational standpoint.

In case the governance body isn't in place, then the ethics team and connected SMEs can come upfront to handle the proceedings accordingly.