THE ETHICS OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
by Inderpal Bhandari, executive editor at large
Recently, I came across a situation that made me reflect on the ethical aspects of data warehousing and data mining. Ethical issues such as privacy, abuse of trust and rampant profiteering were raised. I was invited to speak at Forum '98, the annual meeting of the National Action Committee for Minorities in Engineering (NACME). In keeping with it's name, NACME's mission is to help African-American, Latino and Native-American youth stay and thrive in academia. Since Miriam Masullo of NACME (who was our guest columnist several weeks ago) has had me thinking about the applicability of data mining to the problem of assessing the academic potential of minority youth, I thought that would be a great subject for my speech.
I would start off by explaining what data mining was all about by using my favorite example, namely, the IBM Advanced Scout program used by National Basketball Association coaches. This would clearly go down well with an audience that would include a large number of young college students in addition to educators and administrators. Next, I would talk about the importance of identifying strategic applications of data mining in the field of education. I would end by suggesting that alternative assessment methods, based on mining data that captured a student's interactions with his or her environment including their use of available educational resources, are potential strategic applications. I expected that I would speak for about 45 minutes and then spend another ten minutes or so fielding questions with great adroitness, basking in the adulation of an audience that was clearly enamored of my clear vision of their future. I did indeed speak for 45 minutes.
The question-answer session took more time than my speech. The first ten minutes or so were indeed devoted to clarifying technical aspects of data mining. Once they had understood the concept, the next half hour or so was devoted to an intense discussion of the ethical merits of doing an alternative assessment based on data. From my point of view, this was completely unexpected. Such discussion seldom occurs when I speak to a business or a technical audience. The business audience worries mainly about the ROI, the technical audience about whether a technological advance has truly been made. Once in a while, someone will touch on the subject of privacy but it is never more than a few minutes before order is restored and we get back to the main interests.
The questions from the NACME audience on ethical issues came fast and furious. Did I realize that we were now talking about the life of a student? Was this a solution looking for a problem, i.e., did Virtual Gold wish to make money by foisting data mining technology on educational institutions? I began to realize after a while that, while they seemed personal, these questions were really not meant in that spirit. It was simply a way of laying out the landscape to discuss the ethics of the proposal in my speech.
Having reviewed my bona fides, the audience proceeded to debate the hard questions seldom addressed by technologists. Who should be entrusted to collect the data about a student? How would they make sure that the collection process is fair? Who would use the results of the analysis? Who could misuse the results of the analysis? And so on and so forth, the questions now being directed as much to other members of the audience as they were to me.
Miriam Masullo told me later that such debate is not at all uncommon among educators. If the audience understands the material, they will consider the ethical implications rigorously. I left the session thinking that it may not be a bad idea for us in the business intelligence community to take a leaf out of their book. It maybe a good idea to get away from the ever-consuming ROI interests and debate the ethics once in a while. My experience at NACME also convinced me that such debate is an answer. It is not that we have to come up with a grand, sweeping solution to all the ethical issues in our field of endeavor. It is more that we have to foster debate and awareness, which in turn, will ensure that those issues are duly addressed.
---
Inderpal Bhandari can be reached via http://www.virtualgold.com