Ellen was promoted two weeks 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 phone users are even 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 who claims responsibility for the locator application, is puzzled by Ellen's concern; he says that it was originally developed as part of an anti-theft package for the company laptops. It was part of the company library, and Geoff argues that it's still a valuable security feature. He points out that the feature for opening up an audio and video connection to the phone from the central office was dropped. When asked, he says he has the location data for the last ten months, though apparently no one has ever asked for it. 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, it's been mentioned at some past meetings." Ellen has her doubts. Later she checks with Purchasing and discovers that during those ten months three phones were reported lost and had to be replaced,so clearly the location feature isn't widely known.
Ellen must decide 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? What angle
should she take? Ellen's taskforce charge does include writing and
distributing documentation.
Until a decision is reached, is there anything she
should do regarding the online data collection? Should she continue it?
Limit it? Make it "official", and create a Use & Access policy for
it? What should she do with the last ten months' of data? Is this phone
application in fact a legitimate
security feature?
Finally, how should Ellen proceed with her boss, Frank? Should she lay
out the facts, and let him decide, or should she act on her own? Should she approach Frank as if he does
know about the application, or as if he does not? Should she mention
Geoff's apparent ability to track any
employee in real time? Frank is known to keep a close eye on
the bottom line, but he does not generally micromanage. He's also very concerned with the overall
motivation of the workforce.
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)