Editorial: On IRIE Vol. 10 (by courtesy of IRIE, please visit the website and download the full issue at www.i-r-i-e.net)

The inspiration for this special issue began at a conference held in Stuttgart, Germany in December 2007, in which representatives of business and academia, among them experts on business ethics, economists as well as business data processing specialists, discussed the points of convergence between Business and Moral Intelligence. At this conference it became increasingly clear that the tension between Business and Moral Intelligence – though of increasing economical, political and social importance – still lacks a thorough scientific investigation.

In addition, in our discussion it became apparent that Business Intelligence was defined in terms of an intelligence agency for corporations, alluding to the gathering of "secret" or "insider-information" about the competitors. Moreover, this definition also spans strategies, processes and technologies used in order to achieve significant knowledge of the status, potential and perspectives of any given business. However, as this issue shows, there is a broader understanding of Business Intelligence that goes beyond the definition shared above. It ranges from technical applications for supporting management decisions, to the quest of information about the actual and potential customers, to designing products that prevent data abuse and to ethical aspects of IT in general. Furthermore, Business Intelligence can be understood as a way a company runs its business in an intelligent manner, which would be rather Intelligent Busi-ness than Business Intelligence.

Now not only the broader definition of Business Intelligence points to some moral aspects. Since technology itself can be viewed as an ethical issue, this also goes for Business Intelligence in a nar-rowly defined sense. Fritzsche demonstrates that the critical potential in which Business Intelligence is exposed is when IT becomes "an essential element of the process of decision making itself. With Business Intelligence, we are not only able to decide better or more efficiently. We are able to decide in a completely new way, sharing the authority for our decisions with the technology we use." In this sense "the usage of IT creates an ethical challenge".

One ethical aspect that Fritzsche discusses is that on the one hand technologies need to be simplified so that the user can re-establish his authority over the system. On the other hand this deconstruction diminishes the benefit of technology. Although Business Intelligence provides a technological solution for this difficulty, it becomes clear that the problem of the user now shifts to the engineers who have to ensure an adequate simplification of the system. Like Fritzsche, Siemoneit emanates from Business Intelligence in its narrowly defined sense and discusses the impact of Ambient Intelligence on it. Embedding IT-systems in everyday objects leads to ethical issues as well, for instance the loss of privacy by saving personal data on a grand scale. In order to exemplify the various arising problems, Siemoneit refers to the smart factory where individuals come under the domination of machines and the privacy of workers is endangered. Furthermore, he indicates the assets and drawbacks of "Pay-As-You-Drive" models for insurance companies and their clients.

In everyday work-life Business Intelligence often goes along with delinquency, especially when it is used for espionage. Wright states that most organisations fail "to recognise all aspects of the security risks that they are exposed to" while at the same time cyber-crime rises because it becomes more profitable the more data is comprised. Besides, organisations focusing on e-crime give attention to detection and prosecution but hardly to prevention and intelligence analysis. The e-crime consultant defines eight innovative measures in order to secure data including the establishment of "E-Crime Departments", a "proactive hi-tech crisis management so as to identify those who use technology for an unlawful purpose" and procedures which will ensure that any electronic evidence for criminal activities does not get lost.

While there is a broad range of understanding for Business Intelligence, the authors agree that Moral Intelligence is not the application of morality for business objectives. On the contrary, it describes the willingness and ability to put something else than oneself and something else than efficiency matters in the centre of ones reflections. However, Moral Intelligence in practice is reinforced by voluntary tasks, such as the Global Compact or Corporate Governance, as well as by the law. Often there is an apparent difference between the lived rules and the corporate norms (a company‟s morality).

Moreover, as the article of Bardy and Rubens shows, there are variations between business ethics and the models of Corporate Governance in the U.S. and continental Europe. Notwithstanding the differences, they conclude that in order to solve ethical issues it needs a rational theoretical (even philosophical) foundation on the one hand and a specific content that is generated from real-life experiences on the other hand. While the methodical reflection on morality is another category, namely business ethics, than morality itself, it is of utmost importance that the ethical knowledge of intellectuals and of a critical public does not persist in a purely theoretical discussion, but that they seek a dialogue with practical economy. However, it is hard to breach the economic logic, especially in large corporations. The compulsion to satisfy the shareholder value on the management level is carried forward throughout the whole corporate hierarchy by given objectives and per-formance-based salaries. Meanwhile, a practical economy that strives to meet ethical demands, needs managers who behave in a way that they can be taken as role models.

The difficulties of implementing some sort of Moral Intelligence in IT-projects are shown by the ex-periences of Manders-Huits and Zimmer in two different technical design communities: Vehicle Safety Communication Technology and User Profiling Infrastructures. Their attempts to influence the design of technologies revealed "discouraging results" and lead them to define three "Key Challenges of Value-Conscious Design" in order to overcome crucial pragmatic challenges in future projects. When it comes to Business Intelligence meeting Moral Intelligence, the media plays a decisive role in that it filters overall information and frames the set of values. Scrutinising the value judgements of the media with regard to the content as well as to the methodology could lead to a more objective and balanced view of those frictions that become apparent in talk shows, newspapers and Internet forums.

It is noteworthy that due to developmental progress within communication technologies „the civil society catches up‟. The Internet has deregulated the media by depriving its power. Hence the citizen has more possibilities of participation in society now, more than ever. Yet this opportunity faces the risk that the data obtained by Business Intelligence is misemployed like with new forms of corporate espionage, a higher vulnerability of business secrets, the balance between corporate privacy and publication as well as the modified relation to one‟s own privacy within social Internet portals. Spence, who is topping off the issue at hand, is concerned with the media whose "‟business intelligence‟ must be congruent with „moral intelligence‟", while in conflict situations the moral aspect always has priority. Furthermore, Spence accentuates the responsibility of the media that produce and distribute a good that is public just like food and medicine: information, which is according to the author "doubly normative". This issue aims at inspiring a further and more detailed research in Business and Moral Intelli-gence. Only a few aspects of this rather new and roughly defined field are touched here and it must remain less than a general overview. Still we hope to give the reader an idea of this manifold matter that will gain in importance with the further devel-opment of technology.

Yours sincerely,

Yvonne Thorhauer and Stefan Blachfellner,
The Editors of the International Review of Information Ethics [IRIE, 10] Special Issue Business Intelligence meets Moral Intelligence