Ethical Data Is the Only Data: SJU’s Approach to Data Ethics in Business

In today’s digital age, data has become a company’s most valuable resource. It drives company decisions, encourages new value propositions and helps predict successful product launches and marketing campaigns. But what happens when businesses use their data unethically?

Ethics in business and quantitative studies is often overlooked. “Ethics is based in so many things — education, health care, etc. It’s easy to understand for most students in those contexts, but it’s least understandable to quantitative students. There is an ethical urgency there,” explains Virginia Miori, Ph.D., professor and chair of decision & system sciences at Saint Joseph’s University.

“Unethical versus ethical data comes down to a couple of things. Data needs to be as accurate as possible. You can’t eliminate data you don’t like because it’s an outlier. You can’t adapt data to meet your needs. Real-life data is not clean. The process of cleaning it has to be taken on in a careful fashion.”

From Wells Fargo to Enron, scandals have occurred when businesses take advantage of their consumer data by using it illegally or without the customer's consent. “At SJU and within the Department of Decisions & System Sciences, we bring ethics to the forefront. We are the people putting students on the ground that will not let this happen on their watch,” says Miori.

Ethics is at the center of SJU business intelligence students’ curriculum. Students within the business school take three ethics-based courses: Introduction to Information Systems, Business Statistics and Business Analytics. Students majoring in business intelligence take an additional six courses. “Every course and every faculty member embeds ethical data use in classes. We don’t just teach techniques or how to use data. We do ethical analysis.”

An ethical analysis starts with an underlying set of assumptions — that the data is from a set of an appropriate size and properly represents the diversity of the population. According to Miori, if these assumptions are not met, it’s impossible to know if the analysis is correct. “Outliers are a common thing, but you need to understand what the data is trying to accomplish or where it comes from. If you understand how you should be interpreting the data, you’re able to spot discrepancies.”

As the amount of data available and its value continues to grow, Miori says a deep understanding of ethical data usage and analysis will set SJU students ahead of the curve.

“The most important thing is when students leave SJU, they do not leave as one-dimensional individuals. By adding this ethics-based view of data and analysis, we’re creating well-rounded individuals that have a more aggressive path through their organizations and companies. They’re not just sitting in the back of the room crunching numbers. They have knowledge of how to ensure data is handled ethically and remains valid––this is not something you’re going to find everywhere.”

Editor’s note: The work of the department was recently featured in Saint Joseph’s University Magazine.