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Chapter 10 • Global, Ethics, and Security Management 277

ERP experts say it’s never too soon to plan for installing upgrades, maintaining modules,
troubleshooting problems, and policing platforms once the software enters the longest phase of its
life cycle—ongoing operations. When and for whom does an outsourcing ERP operation make
sense? Furthermore, once that decision has been made, what are the major contract-negotiation and
management issues IT executives should consider as ERP implementation begins to wind down? In
1999, CIO Magazine put those questions before a number of companies that were exercising their
outsourcing options on ERP operations––and one that considered that path but rejected it in favor of
taking care of the work itself. Small and midsize IT organizations will be most inclined to outsource
ERP operations because they lack the resources to handle them internally, but larger companies can
also derive advantages. The reasons for ERP outsourcing are ultimately as varied as the participants.
ERP implementation teams should not consider outsourcing and offshoring when they
want someone else to take accountability or to deflect blame in the event something unfortunate
transpires. Another reason for bringing on an offshore partner is for expediency. In the event
resources are not available due to competing priorities or the resources lack a general set of
knowledge or maturity, send the work to a qualified partner and reap the benefits of watching and
learning for the first time. This approach may, in fact, reduce risk and give the staff a chance to
improve their skills for the next project.
No matter whose logo is on the paychecks, the challenge of managing the folks in the ERP
trenches doesn’t go away. “It takes more work on our side of this than I originally thought,” says
Coup. “You can’t just turn (any part of SAP) over to someone and then sit back while they go and
do the job. We’ve found that we have to have very active involvement from good technical people
working with the vendor.”

ETHICS
Ethics is a general term for what is often described as the science of morality. In philosophy, ethical
behavior is that which is good or right in a certain value system. Ethics is different from law.
Whereas laws are enacted by the government or developed through a process of jurisprudence and
enforced by the legal system, ethics are developed through culture, value, and belief system of an
individual with influence from family or society. Ethical violations cannot be curbed unless they
are made part of the law. For example, some of the disclosure rules enforced by the
Sarbanes–Oxley (SOX) Act were enacted into law for enforcement across all U.S. corporations;
however, they were considered unethical and implemented in many companies even before SOX.
ERP implementations can have a wide variety of impacts on the ethical principles of the
organization. Consider the following scenario:

The ERP system integrates information from various departments of the organization.
What if the one department finds out the expenses of another department and reports to
everyone in the company? Should this sort of information sharing be allowed? Should
the company have developed a policy on accessing information from the system?

Abuses like the preceding one are eventually observed, converted into authorization policy,
and enforced by the security system of the company. Two forces endanger privacy in the
information age: one is the growth of information technology and other is increased value of
information in decision making. Misinformation has a way of “fouling up” people’s lives, partic-
ularly when the party with the inaccurate information has an advantage in power and authority.
There are substantial economic and ethical concerns surrounding property rights, which revolve