Todd Douglas Jones was the director of IT at Central Colorado State when the ERP system was implemented. He was a big advocate of the ERP system because he had seen such systems work elsewhere and was convinced it would work well at the university.

Todd was charged with the task of determining the costs and benefits for the new system. After some preliminary research on the topic, he decided that cost should primarily be measured in the price of the product and the number of hours of training for the users of the system. Benefits will be determined by the reduction in operating costs.

In order to help the university’s president and staff see that the benefits of purchasing and implementing an ERP solution outweighed the costs, Todd shaded the facts in order to make the ERP choice look more promising. Todd did a number of questionable things:

1. He researched 10 schools that had implemented a similar system. He could have used the cost and labor of all 10 schools as estimates for his school. However, in his opinion, three of the schools mismanaged the implementation, and he chose not to include those schools in his estimate, resulting in a lower cost estimate for his university.
2. He estimated that end-user training would be 750 hours, although he expected at least 1,000 hours would be needed. He planned to fund the other 250 hours from his IT training budget for next year.
3. To calculate cost savings, Todd used a different set of 10 schools than he used in item a. He believed that these 10 schools were closer in size to his own school and were more representative of his university, and they made the cost savings look better than the 10 other schools.

Six months after the very successful implementation, Todd was hailed as a visionary. the university is saving thousands of dollars a month. Seven months after the implementation, an auditor discovered the three questionable activities listed above.

You are Todd. Your boss knows what you did. You look into your own motivations and with a clear conscience you tell yourself: I did not tell a lie. I knew that the system would be a tremendous success, and if I did not help the boss come to see that I would have let a great opportunity pass us by. I did what was best for the most people. I did not directly profit from this. if I were the boss, I would want my IT manager to help me reach the right conclusion, too. and look how it turned out—that alone shows I did the right thing.

Was Todd ethical in his actions? Use both the categorical imperative and utilitarianism in your answer.

Of the actions taken by Todd, which one was the least ethical?

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From the perspective of the categorical imperative which evaluates actions based on universalizabili... View the full answer