Ellen was promoted two months ago to head a task force on smartphone
software in the IT division of her company; her new position reports
directly to Frank, the company CIO. At Ellen's company, most employees
are now allocated smartphones that are equipped with an in-house
software package to support sales and consulting. She's been reviewing
software development to date, and one particular application rather
startles her: it's an app that logs the GPS coordinates of the phone
every 10 minutes, and uploads the data to the central office on demand.
Ellen is concerned, because she knows that, in general, employees
tend to be very suspicious of attempts by their employers to track
their whereabouts using GPS phones [Baase, p 338, text and sidebar].
Yet Ellen has heard nothing about this particular issue at her company;
she suspects that in fact no one is aware of it. Further complicating
the issue is that employees are given permission to use the phones for
personal calls, and are in fact encouraged to carry them around
off-hours in case a support call comes through, or a sales prospect
happens to turn up (the phones allow a complete demo of most of the
company's products).
Ellen asks about this at the next team meeting. Geoff, the person in
charge of the locator application, is puzzled; he says that it was
originally developed three years ago for GPS-equipped company laptops,
as a security feature, at the behest of one of the senior executives.
It was part of the company library, and Geoff argues that it's still a
valuable security feature. When asked, he says he has the location data
for the last five months. He opens his laptop, fiddles a few moments,
and says, "See? Frank is at that conference in Atlanta, and you can see
here that his phone is right at the downtown Marriott." Ellen asks
Geoff if the CIO knows about this feature; Geoff says "well, I just
assumed he must; after all, he approved the original laptop-tracking
package." Ellen has her doubts.
Ellen now does not know how to proceed. Should she go with Geoff's
idea that tracking phones is no different from tracking laptops, even
though most of the company's field laptops do not in fact support GPS?
Should she publicize the new feature, and, if so, how? Until a decision
is reached, should she deactivate the software? Is there anything she
should do regarding the online data collection? Should she continue it?
Limit it? What should she do with the last five months' of data? And
should she say anything about Geoff's apparent ability to track any
employee in real time? Is this phone application in fact a legitimate
security feature?
And how should Ellen proceed with her boss, Frank? Should she lay
out the facts, and let him decide? Should she approach Frank as if he does
know about the application, or as if he does not? Should she mention
Geoff's demo? Should she pitch it as a security feature, or raise other
issues first? Should she make some suggestions to Frank as to how to proceed? Ellen
feels a wee bit guilty that she didn't notice this issue for two
months; should she address that? Frank is known to keep a close eye on
the bottom line, but he's also very concerned with the overall
motivation of the workforce. And he does not like his staff to dump unexpected problems in his lap.
Your paper will be graded primarily on organization
(that is, how you lay out your sequence of paragraphs), focus (that is,
whether you stick to the topic), and the nature and completeness of
your arguments. It is essential
that all quotations from other sources be indicated as such, at a
minimum by using quotation marks or block quotes and preferably by a
citation as well.
Expected length: 3-5 pages (600+ words)