MIS741 – Analysing the Impact of Digital Business

Deakin’s Bachelor of Commerce and MBA are internationally EPAS accredited.
Deakin Business School is accredited by AACSB.
MIS741 – Analysing the Impact of Digital Business
Trimester 1, 2017
Assessment 2 – Moral Dilemma Analysis report
(Individual)

Learning Outcome Details

Assessment Feedback
Students who submit their work (final submission) by the due date will receive their marks and
feedback on CloudDeakin on Friday 2 June 2017, 5:30PM.
Description / Requirements
This is an individual assignment where you will research and then produce a written Moral Dilemma
Analysis report using the Ethical Decision‐Making Framework introduced in topics 3 and 4. The
moral dilemma is as follows:
Is it moral for IS product/service organisations to pay full‐time, continuing employed IS
sales staff a $15,000 per annum wage, and pay most income based only on the number of
IS product/service sales they make to external business clients?
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With this dilemma, IS sales staff include business analysts, IS consultants, data analysts, etc selling
any IS products/services (e.g. ERP systems, website design/development, business analytics
services, etc). The specific type of IS staff and IS product/service does not matter for the purposes
of this report. Your report should investigate the morality of this issue for any type of IS sales staff
selling any type of IS product/service to clients external to the organisation. You can specify a
particular type of IS sales staff and/or IS product/service if it is easier for you to write the report.
The income based on the number of sales can take many forms including commissions, bonuses
and sales quotas. You are not required to analyse each type of income separately, but rather
analyse the morality of any income earned mostly based on the number of sales. The morality
issues will be (mostly) the same regardless of the type of sales‐based income. When you are
conducting your research (see below for details), you will find it easier to search for a range of
sales‐based income types rather than just one type.
It is quite likely you will limited research specifically relating to IS sales roles and IS
products/services. Your investigation into this moral dilemma should therefore include analysis of
research on the impact of sales‐based income in other professions where this is common, including
financial services, insurance, and so on. The issues are largely the same, regardless of profession.
Research work for the Moral Dilemma Analysis report
It is essential that you do not decide whether the above dilemma is moral or not until after you
have conducted research. The report is not about your personal views about the dilemma. Instead,
you will investigate and argue whether this practice is moral based only on research evidence/facts.
More specifically, the research you undertake should enable you to determine the answers to all
the questions (directly or indirectly) in the Ethical Decision‐Making Framework in relation to a range
of stakeholders. You will then come to your conclusion after this investigation.
The research sources you must find and cite in the body of your report will be credible academic
resources (e.g. journal articles, PhD theses, conference papers, credible research studies). Identify
articles in particular which report empirical research (e.g. experiments, surveys, case studies,
interviews) relating to the moral dilemma (not opinions of researchers) in terms of how it might
affect one or more of the following types of stakeholders (see topic 3):
 The organisation selling IS products/services
 Individual IS sales staff
 The organisation’s business clients
 The public
 The IS industry / profession
You must ensure that your research and analysis of this dilemma is balanced. It is typical for people
and organisations to focus on their own self‐interest (e.g. revenue, profits), and justify the impact
on other stakeholders (e.g. clients, the public, staff). This is not a balanced approach. Your research
and analysis should instead include all potential negative implications (based on the ethical
decision‐making framework) for the various stakeholder groups. As required by the ACS Code of
Professional Conduct, the most important stakeholder group is “the public”, not the organisation,
not the IS staff, etc. The public does not necessarily benefit when organisations make a profit!
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For this reason, a report focusing mainly on the organisation selling the IS products/services and/or
the individual IS sales staff will not receive a good result in this assignment. You are only required to
consider the stakeholder types listed above, and no other stakeholder types are required.
One academic research article to get you started is as follows, but this is more of an opinion article
written by researchers. You can cite this one in your report, but no other opinion articles like this:
Litzky, BE, Eddleston, KA & Kidder, DL 2006, ‘The good, the bad, and the misguided: how
managers inadvertently encourage deviant behaviors’, The Academy of Management
Perspectives, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 91‐103.
<http://ezproxy.deakin.edu.au/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=tr
ue&db=bth&AN=19873411&site=eds‐live&scope=site>
The research you use for your report should focus on sources discussing empirical research (e.g.
experiments, case studies, surveys, etc). An example of such an article to get you started, and which
you can cite, is the following:
Bolander, W., Zahn, W.J., Loe, T.W. and Clark, M. 2015, ‘Managing new salespeople’s ethical
behaviors during repetitive failures: when trying to help actually hurts’, Journal of Business
Ethics, early online,
<http://ezproxy.deakin.edu.au/login?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10551‐015‐2817‐8>
Articles you should not cite or use for your report are those discussing empirical research based on
interviews, surveys, etc of (IS) sales staff or company executives about their views on whether they
are behaving ethically, or on what they would do under certain circumstances. This is because such
research is biased and does not explore the actual sales staff behaviour when they receive sales‐
based income. For instance, such research does not examine whether clients are happy with the
product/service, and this is the main test of whether a salesperson has done a good job. An
example of such studies which you should not cite or use for your report is the following:
Cupach, WR & Carson, JM 2002, ‘The influence of compensation on product
recommendations made by insurance agents’, Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 40, no. 2, pp.
167‐176.
<http://ezproxy.deakin.edu.au/login?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1020355118527>
If you find studies similar to this one shown above, do not use it in your report.
Topic 4 of this unit also highlights that it is important to consider short (1‐3 year), medium (5‐10
years) and long‐term (50+ years) impact of the moral dilemma on each of the above stakeholders.
Your investigation, particularly based on research articles relating to other professions, is an
indication of the positive and negative medium and/or long‐term implications for the IS industry.
The focus of your research should therefore be on quality evidence of the implications of the
practice stated in the dilemma above. This means that “old” research is acceptable for this report. It
is preferable to focus on both new and older quality evidence, than low quality recent evidence.
What to include in the Moral Dilemma Analysis report?
You will write an individual Moral Dilemma Analysis report as follows (after background work):
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 A cover page with the assignment title (“Assessment 2 – Moral Dilemma Analysis report”),
unit code and name, your name and student ID, and the word count. This cover page is not
included in the word count.
 A maximum of 2,500 words for the report body, using the Ethical Decision‐Making
Framework introduced in topics 3 and 4, to analyse the moral dilemma stated above.
o The report will be a convincing argument on what you conclude as the morality of
the dilemma outlined above, not based on your opinion or personal views, but
instead based on solid research and evidence/facts using the framework. The report
will have a very short introduction, multiple sections/subsections, and conclusion.
Note that in‐text citations (see next point) are included in the word count.
 A reference list at least fourteen (14) high quality research sources cited in the report body
in the Harvard format style using the “(Author, Year)” approach to in‐text citation. This
reference list is not included in the word count.
Word limit
See the rubric at the end of this document for word limit penalties. The word count is calculated
by selecting the text of assignment (see above), and using MS Word’s word count feature and
unchecking the “Include textboxes, footnotes and endnotes”.
You must cite the minimum of fourteen (14) research sources (see the ‘Research work…’ section) in
the body of the report. Unlike Assignment 1, you must use the “(Author, Year)” or “Author (Year)”
approach to in‐text citations in this report as shown in the following Harvard formatting guidelines:
http://www.deakin.edu.au/students/studying/study‐support/referencing/harvard
Further requirements for the report are as follows:
 The report cannot include any quotes, images/figures or summarises from other sources.
The entire report must be in your own words. In particular, review the following guidelines
about paraphrasing (note that ‘summarising’ and ‘quoting’ is not permitted in this report).
o http://www.deakin.edu.au/students/studying/study‐
support/referencing/summarising‐paraphrasing‐quoting
 You cannot use scanned tables (or images with text) and insert this in your report. All text in
the body of the report, even if it is scanned, will be added to your word count. Please see
rubric for details of the penalties which apply to exceeding the word count for this report.
Submission Instructions
The final submission for the Moral Dilemma Analysis report must be one (1) single file, named
surname_MIS741_T1_year_assign2 (e.g. Liang_MIS741_T1_2017_assign2), including:
 A cover page with the assignment title (“Assessment 2 – Moral Dilemma Analysis report”),
unit code and name, your name and student ID, and the word count.
 The Moral Dilemma Analysis report
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Use the submission folder under the Assessments tab, then Assignments in CloudDeakin.
You must keep a backup copy of every assignment you submit, until the marked assignment has
been returned to you. In the unlikely event that one of your assignments is misplaced, you will
need to submit your backup copy.
Any work you submit may be checked by electronic or other means for the purposes of detecting
collusion and/or plagiarism.
When you are required to submit an assignment through your CloudDeakin unit site, you will
receive an email to your Deakin email address confirming that it has been submitted. You should
check that you can see your assignment in the Submissions view of the Assignment dropbox folder
after upload, and check for, and keep, the email receipt for the submission.
Notes
 Past students were found guilty of plagiarism, and given zero, when changing some/most/
all words of a source and pasting this into assignments. Plagiarism includes using translation
tools to modify someone’s text and pasting into assignments (e.g. see Table N.1). The
acceptable approach to use and cite sources can be found at the link below. Based on this,
you will see that the examples in Table N.1 are not examples of paraphrasing:
http://www.deakin.edu.au/students/studying/study‐
support/referencing/summarising‐paraphrasing‐quoting
It is academic/professional misconduct to use other peoples’ work as your own, and/or
create all/most of your report using material copied/modified from other sources. Even if
Turnitin returns a low percentage, you can still be found guilty of plagiarism. Further, such
reports are usually poor quality and will get a fail mark, even if not proven as plagiarism.
Table N.1: Examples of plagiarism using translation/thesaurus tools

 Penalties for late submission: The following marking penalties will apply if you submit an
assessment task after the due date without an approved extension: 5% will be deducted from
available marks for each day up to five days, and work that is submitted more than five days
after the due date will not be marked. You will receive 0% for the task. ‘Day’ means working
1
GS1 Australia 2016, About us, retrieved 7 February 2017, <https://www.gs1au.org/about‐us/>
2
Australian Barcodes 2007, Frequently asked questions about barcodes, retrieved 7 February 2017,
<http://www.australianbarcodes.com.au/FAQs.php>
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day for paper submissions and calendar day for electronic submissions. The Unit Chair may
refuse to accept a late submission where it is unreasonable or impracticable to assess the task
after the due date.
 For more information about academic misconduct, special consideration, extensions, and
assessment feedback, please refer to the document Your rights and responsibilities as a
student in this Unit in the first folder next to the Unit Guide of the Resources area in the
CloudDeakin unit site.
 Building evidence of your experiences, skills and knowledge (Portfolio) ‐ Building a portfolio
that evidences your skills, knowledge and experience will provide you with a valuable tool to
help you prepare for interviews and to showcase to potential employers. There are a number
of tools that you can use to build a portfolio. You are provided with cloud space through
OneDrive, or through the Portfolio tool in the Cloud Unit Site, but you can use any storage
repository system that you like. Remember that a Portfolio is YOUR tool. You should be able
to store your assessment work, reflections, achievements and artefacts in YOUR Portfolio.
Once you have completed this assessment piece, add it to your personal Portfolio to use and
showcase your learning later, when applying for jobs, or further studies. Curate your work by
adding meaningful tags to your artefacts that describe what the artefact represents.
MIS741 Assignment 2: Moral Dilemma Analysis Report (Feedback Rubric/Assessment Criteria)
GLO2 Communication (written) – 30%

GLO8 Global citizenship – 70%

* Please note the assignment requirements state that the report should not include scanned words (e.g. scanned tables, images, figures) and not include images/figures.

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