Professional Ethics Pathology in IT Consultant Firms (Enterprise Architecture Projects)

Outsourcing is the most important approach for organizational development projects. This approach is very common in information technology development projects. The goal of this research is finding and prioritizing discordant instances with professional ethics in initiation, implementation and after implementation stages of organization enterprise information technology planning projects. The method of this research is mixed. Because of low number research in this field, three organizations that had enterprise architecture project experience choose for finding discordant instances with professional ethics in consultant firms. Then we created a questionnaire with our findings and sent it to thirty-five IT experts that had enterprise architecture project experiences. Twenty-one of them completed the questionnaire. Finally, Items prioritized according to average of responses. We found twenty professional ethics pathology items in initiation, implementation and after implementation stages of enterprise architecture planning programs. Questionnaires analysis indicated high percentage of agreement with professional ethics discordant by IT consultant firms especially in initiation and after implementation stages. The main base of consultant firm’s behaviors is economic revenue instead of solving customer problems. The most amoral behaviors are in situations that result in decrease in cost or increase in income and contain economical result for consultants. Consulting firms prefer short-time benefits of projects to long term benefits of customer relationship and well-known in industry.