In the mid-2010s, the automobile industry seemed to be taking sustainability seriously. It’s simple, wrote one in their annual sustainability report for the year, “If good sustainability is good business, then better sustainability is better business.” At the same time, at least five and as many as 12 car manufacturers have been accused of fixing their emissions under test conditions and are now subject to legal action. The ensuing scandal has been estimated to have cost just one of these companies $34bn in the first 5 years of the news breaking thanks to fines and reputational harm leading to lost sales. Many other cases are waiting to come to court in 12 months.
How can both of these be true? Were these companies lying about their carbon reduction ambitions, or were the emissions cheating carried out by rogue engineers? While we may never know for sure, I suspect that it was neither. Rather it was a case of these manufacturers failing to have joined up thinking between their business goals, their values, and their technology. For companies that wanted to value sustainability, they should have done better and are now paying the price for it.
We've reached the final part of our series looking at digital ethics strategies, where we’ve explored what they are, the benefits organisations get from having one, and what’s included in one. In this post we explore how to develop a digital ethics strategy for your own business. With a digital ethics strategy in place, an organisation should avoid making the same mistakes as these car companies through having a joined up and considered approach to goals, values and technology.
Strategy helps organisations to focus on how they will succeed. Strategy directs organisations to focus on how they will succeed.
There are six phases of a strategic planning process that we outline in this article.
1. Discovery and analysis
Leaders must identify and analyse the gaps and inefficiencies in their organisation’s processes, ensuring alignment with the overall vision and values. A discovery project is key to their effort, drawing on comprehensive stakeholder feedback through employee surveys, focus groups, and stakeholder interviews. This approach helps to uncover both challenges and opportunities and can bring fresh eyes to old problems, or helping to identify problems hitherto unknown. Gathering data from external agencies, customers, and industry best practices can offer valuable, actionable insights.
2. Stakeholder buy-in
To successfully implement significant changes, securing stakeholder buy-in is essential. The easiest way to achieve this is by involving stakeholders in the planning process and showing them that the project has the support of leadership. Get stakeholders on the same page with a presentation to senior leadership, followed by a question-and-answer session. In any case, but especially where there may be conflicting interests, an external moderator can bring a level of objectivity to the discussion and keep it constructive. Bringing in external digital ethics consultants can also add the required expertise and objectivity, depending on a project’s scope.
Identifying and involving the correct stakeholders, including IT, Legal and Risk Management, and Procurement teams in the strategy's development is crucial as their insights, dedication, and responsibility are key to the strategy's success. However, effective stakeholder engagement extends beyond senior members of the organisation. By seeking input from across the organisation, you’ll foster broader acceptance and support for the strategy.
Ideally, gathering feedback from external stakeholders - clients, customers and suppliers - ensures the organisation's visions and values align with those it serves. Where customer values differ from those of the organisation, this may lead to a re-evaluation of the organisation’s values or its vendor relationships, ensuring a more aligned approach.
3. Assigning roles and responsibilities
Ethics has a reputation for not being able to speak the language of business, typically lacking a dedicated champion in the C-suite. It risks becoming “everyone’s responsibility” which means in effect that it is no-one’s. It’s essential that a senior figure in the C-suite, with strong interpersonal skills and the ability to educating about ethics and technology and their ability to fulfil organisational potential, be identified as owner. At the same time, managing roles and responsibilities can be deeply political, and so an external perspective can be helpful to ground recommendations from a more objective standpoint.
Create a detailed project charter outlining the project scope, roles and responsibilities in this phase. Use a RACI matrix to define these roles and increase employee accountability.
4. Implementation
A strategy is of little use if it sits on a shelf gathering dust: it must be put into action, and those engaged with in the process will expect to see the results of that process. Clearly outline the budget, deliverables, and timelines for change. Given that external factors may sway the timelines, it is crucial to highlight and prioritise long-term and medium-term ethics goals and objectives. This allows the creation of a plan with a strategic roadmap, connecting strategy with outcomes. Ideally, tie this roadmap in with clear KPIs and objectives. There is a wealth of writing on best practices in this area that can ensure that the changes brought through the process of the strategy impact an organisation at the informal cultural level (one might say, the one that really matters), as well as in formal policies.
Implementation will need to include a training plan and a communications strategy. These elements can be significant undertakings, requiring a training needs assessment and an assessment of best communications practice. However, these can be incorporated into the Audit process and form part of the initial data collection phase of developing the strategy.
The communications strategy brings us back to the centrality of organisational leadership in the development of a strategy. This should not be a side of desk activity for a senior manager – it needs to come from (and have the bite from) the very top. Failure to be explicit will result in people assuming that “those who really matter” prioritise either goals over values or values over goals, with the former most likely to win out when push comes to shove in a business environment. That way lies the path of the car companies.
5. Review and documentation
Not all implementation will be successful first time. And long-term plans need to adapt as circumstances change. Therefore, it is essential to regularly track the progress of your ethics change plan. This ongoing tracking will help project and document it for future reference.
6. Metrics
The best way to secure future budget is to show the organisation has spent wisely and in a way that enables it to achieve its business goals with an eye to a business future that is mature and free from ethical risk. The simplest way to do this is through using an ethics maturity assessment. This can be tailored to the specific values and vision of the organisation and will provide a clear, objective measure of success and progress within the organisation.
Annually, aligned with your financial year, review your progress, assess improvements and submit your roadmap and budget for the coming year. Ideally, map this onto an outcomes dashboard that will track progress over time. Some areas that can provide valuable metrics include:
- Projects- Illustrate their return on investment and show how the adoption of ethics has improved.
- Employee Results- Illustrate that staff and clients are satisfied with ethics, using internal or external customer satisfaction scores, such as Great Place to Work (GPTW) or the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
- Customer Results- Use an ethics risk assessment heatmap to illustrate the mitigations in place to cover the most likely and most impactful incidents that could occur. Also conduct regular trust and transparency audits with customers/users to take a temperature check.
- Improvement- Demonstrate through the audits and using an ethics maturity model that standards have been maintained or how they have been improved.
The power of a digital ethics strategy
With an effective Digital Ethics Strategy, an organisation will have a shared vision, budget and understanding of where it is going and how ethics will help it get there. The strategy will help integrate organisational values with the technology and culture of that organisation and move ethics and compliance beyond a mere box-ticking exercise. Given the value that is brought through external, objective viewpoints that can support best practice, it is no surprise that many turn to digital ethics consultants to help in this space.
Sopra Steria has worked with clients in the private and public sectors to develop Digital Ethics Strategies that carry through their corporate values into their technology and culture. This has been in areas of AI strategy and implementation, technology accessibility considerations for employees, understanding and communicating the need to collect protected characteristic data to uncover potential bias, and more. These have led to real change in the way organisations go about their business, from developing their use of AI to build customer trust to ensuring that the wellbeing and productivity of all staff is emphasised in practice as well as policy. If you would like to know about the work that we do, please contact Kevin Macnish.