Corporate Digital Responsibility: the next ethical frontier

There have been two megatrends that have dominated the last decade: digitization and ethics and sustainability, but so far there have been few points of intersection between these two trends, largely because ethics and sustainability tends to deal with the physical world, and digitization largely deals with the virtual world. But you can think of data in a very similar way to a physical product, and with that there are a number of ethical issues including how it is sourced, transported, sold, packaged and destroyed. This is where corporate digital responsibility (CDR) comes into play.

CDR is a set of practices and behaviors that help an organization use data and digital technologies in a way that is socially, economically, technically and environmentally responsible. Professors Isik and Wade guided participants through how companies can effectively formulate a CDR strategy. They recommend three questions to consider when making decisions on how to manage CDR:

1.       Why are you doing it?

Is your overall approach compliance-driven or is it rooted in your purpose? Like most things there isn’t a black and white answer. We recommend a trust but verify approach. It is always effective to be purpose driven in your mission, but it is best backed up by some degree of regulation. If possible, align incentives with responsible behaviors.

2.       What are you doing?

Are you taking a reactive approach where you are focused on being agile and fast to change with the landscape, but not spending a great deal of time trying to predict the future? Or are you being proactive, looking towards the future and including what you think will become an issue in your plans now? We recommend being as proactive as you can. You should strive to anticipate future trends and build them into your digital pipeline.

“You have to try and anticipate changes that will happen, we will be judged by the ethical norms of the future,” says Wade. “Just being reactive is not going to be enough. But at the same time, you also have to react to unpredictable changes…This means you need to have agile systems and processes for this to work.”