IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022 - 78

Technological Stewardship and Responsible Innovation
When a high-risk design path (III) is necessary,
then this analysis is further deepened. The impact or
damage potential is analyzed for all those system values
that need special care. The probability of threats
is scrutinized. Depending on the damage potential
and the likelihood of a threat, corresponding controls
are chosen and residual risk is documented (for
more information, see [10]).
The overall reason for both risk-based approaches
is that by conceiving of values as " being-at-risk, "
development teams are put into a spirit of care and
awareness long called for by computer ethicists.
Figure 3 illustrates how the chain from core values,
to value qualities, to EVRs and their threats and controls
(system requirements) are traced through a numbered
chain that is documented in the value register.
In this way, organizations are able to show their compliance
with prioritized values. They can recap why
they took or failed to take certain value-based decisions.
When system requirements are entered into the
product roadmap and implemented, this chain can
be continued. As a result, an organization keeps track
of its ethical maturity. It remembers how value-based
system features were prioritized in comparison to
nonvalue-based ones. And it also records whether
the system's validation period confirmed value creation
and/or effective value breach prohibition. When
value qualities do not actualize as planned or unexpected
ones appear, this can be monitored in the
value register and another EVR analysis with subsequent
risk-based design can be triggered.
The description of VBE with IEEE 7000 shows
that ethical engineering is not an isolated corporate
process that can be outsourced to compliance management,
risk management, or the corporate social
responsibility (CSR) department. Instead, it is an
integrated, strategic exercise that drives the technical
" value proposition " at the heart of an organization.
For this reason, it is recommended that the earliest
possible phases of product design are accompanied
by VBE. One case study with a telemedicine company
[31] showed that if VBE is implemented too late,
when an SOI's business purpose is already fixed, then
management's readiness to change the value mission
in line with VBE's ethical exploration is limited.
This does not mean that VBE is only suited to
early startup phases. It can also be applied to brownfield
situations. But then the organization employing
it must be prepared to heavily invest. This is because
VBE typically leads--our case studies show [31],
78
--to a very different technology narrative (what
technology can be good for), often requiring an
adapted architecture.
Another challenge is that a VBE organization
must involve its key service partners. The ecosystem
around an SOI--the so-called " system-of-systems " --
must be part of the VBE analysis to avoid unexpected
and uncontrollable undermining of values. This
again means that SOI operators may have to forgo
some preferred supply chain partners. IEEE 7000
requires partners who are ready to give secure
appropriate access to their systems for transparency
reasons, which is often not the case in today's highly
distributed service architectures.
Sometimes there will not be reliable enough
partners and an organization needs to build a technology
block by itself. The product roadmap that
developers work on is hence heavily influenced.
In VBE organizations, the roadmap is driven just
as much by value-based priorities as by nonvalue-based
requirements in bringing a system up and
running. This is reflected in the debriefing interview
of one of our VBE case studies with UNICEF's Yoma
platform, where the CTO noted that VBE would bring
an " 80%-85% change in terms of how you design a
system " . Still, he added, he would " definitely use it
again, " especially because he felt that VBE would,
crucially, foster stakeholder value rather than the
normal " founder-mentality. "
that saId, Investors need to be ready to give
their money for the stakeholder " good " and not
every capital provider is likely to embrace this. Three
case studies additionally showed, however, that service
creativity is significantly fueled through VBE
[23]. Many more product ideas and value potentials
are unveiled. And--not surprisingly--there is ten
times more value harm detection than in today's
ordinary development approaches [23]. So, while
VBE requires a fundamental rethinking of the way
we approach systems development, it also leads to
more ethical and sustainable investments.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the IEEE 7000 CRG group and
especially Lewis Gray and Ruth Lewis for all their
ideas and recommendations. We also would like to
acknowledge the tireless support of the Ph.D. student
Kathrin Bednar who accompanied in this research
endeavor.
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022

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