This Scenario describes a potential conflict of interest that occurs when Nancy receives a job offer from one of her employer’s clients.
Quality Technology Solutions (QTS) was a major well-respected computer hardware and software vendor. Nancy Johnson worked as a user-support software engineer at the QTS regional centre in the middle of the country. She communicated with her customers mainly by telephone and email. Reported program bugs were passed on to technical support agents, and Nancy provided software patches to her customers over telephone lines, usually via a computer-to-computer connection.
In addition, whenever Nancy heard about difficult software problems, she visited the customer personally. Until last year, her on-site support and occasional training were provided as part of the customers’ maintenance contracts. As a result of Nancy’s expertise, this service became very popular and thus very costly for QTS, so the on-site support service was split from maintenance and billed separately.
During a recent economic recession, QTS’s fortunes declined. As a result, salaries were frozen for 18 months. After that, times continued to be difficult, and people were losing their jobs. Nancy believed that it was only a matter of time before she became a casualty. She knew, however, that she was still valuable to QTS, and her boss had said that she would be the first to get a pay raise when it became possible.
One of QTS’s largest customers, and one of Nancy’s most important clients, was District Benefit (DB) with offices throughout the country. Over a period of time she had established a close relationship with many key employees at DB offices, and there were several offices where employees needed a lot of technical help and training. DB preferred to enter into a contract with QTS, rather than develop its own in-house expertise. Nancy had been working closely with Mike Williams in the Information Services Department of DB, and they know each other well and had high professional respect for each other.
Last week, Mike telephoned Nancy at home.
‘Nancy, I have a proposition you might be interested in.’
‘What is it?’
‘The main office needs someone to help them with their new system. It’s the new BENEFIT-p system that QTS installed six months ago and they desperately need support and training. It is the sort of thing you’re expert at. Do you want to take it on?’
‘It sounds interesting. Just send some details to the office and I’ll put the wheels in motion.’
‘Let me explain. We don’t want QTS to handle the job; we want you to do it personally. If we go to QTS, it will take ages to set it up, and what’s more we will have to pay QTS’s overhead.’
‘I’m not sure, Mike. You’re offering to pay me for the type of work which QTS pays me for and that feels like a conflict of interest.’
‘I don’t think so, and we want you to do the job, not some other consultant who might be allocated by QTS. DB is important to QTS, particularly the work at the main office. I’m sure if we explained the situation to your management they would agree to go along with the arrangement.’
‘Why don’t we then? What’s the rush? Put a proposal to them and maybe they can sort something out in a couple of weeks.’
‘Nancy, you don’t understand. We can’t wait that long! BENEFIT-p was installed to rectify serious problems that we were having in managing the complex benefits package. We simply have to have it working in the very near future. We won’t ask you for any time that would interfere with your normal work schedule at QTS. We’ll fit in with your schedule because we know you’ll do a great job. To make it worth your while, we’ll pay you 25% above the normal rate and give you a 30% bonus on completion of the job. Please come and work for us on this one job.’
Nancy said nothing. She was pleased that her reputation was so good, and she was overwhelmed by the size of the financial offer. It would certainly provide some extra funds if she were to be let go by QTS. But she wondered about the consequences if QTS were to find out, and she was undecided about what to do.
Discussion
What would you do in Nancy’s position?
Does it make any difference that there is uncertainty about Nancy’s current job?
Who does Nancy have a responsibility towards? Does she have a responsibility towards herself and her family?
Article Future vision
In view of the details provided in this case, I'd be surprised if Nancy accepted the proposal. And I guess her decision would result from the practical consideration of the situation, not from resolving an ethical dilemma. Though, as I can guess, the decision would be ethically right too.
What Nancy has been asked to do could likely constitute not only a breach of contractual obligations, but also an infringement of the employer's intellectual property rights. Her employer is the vendor of software which she supports. And the services expected from her would quite likely require the use of the employer's proprietary information, tools, and resources, as well as advice and help of vendor's other employees (including the programmers).
Quite likely, Nancy's employer would sooner or later detect her private services to the client. In the described situation enough employees of the client will be aware of this, and there are high chances of occasional contacts between the client's employees and vendor's employees. Also, e.g., the traces of Nancy's activity will remain in the software code, and can be detected by the vendor's audit of software license compliance by the client, etc.
So, essentially, Nancy was asked to take a real risk of loosing her permanent job, damaging her reputation, and maybe even facing the accusations of the theft of vendor's intellectual property. And all of this in exchange for only a temporary extra income. One can greatly doubt this is a tempting proposal for Nancy, and for her family too.
I can guess that in the described scenario there are two aspects that have more to do with ethics than the above Nancy's dilemma.
One aspect is that the proposal can be regarded as ethically questionable. But the proposal originates from a manager, and managers' culture, including the notion of ethics, is known to differ from the professionals' culture. See [1], and also Robert Schaefer's observations about ' books on management that avoid using the word "ethics"' ([2], p.2).
The other aspect is Nancy's dilemma of whether to inform her employer about this proposal. This information could allow the vendor to optimise the tactics with regard to this client, and there is a chance this will result in some benefits for the vendor, and even for Nancy.
Regarding Nancy's failure to respond to the proposal, I have already explained why I'd doubt this shows there is really an ethical dilemma for her. And possibly this is even not a dilemma at all. She might have decided for herself immediately. But in such situations, the absence of any explicit response (except maybe a polite smile) can sometimes be a convenient way of releasing no information, taking no obligations, and giving the initiator of the proposal a chance to think a bit about the appropriateness of the proposal - and maybe about the ethics.
Of course, the above is by far not the only possible interpretation of this thought-provoking question.
P.S. I read Simon Rogerson's article, mentioned below the question, with great interest, and I appreciate very much the factual information and many of the ideas reflected in it.
References
1. Dave Miller, "Bridging between software management and software professionalism," in T. Daughtrey, S. Carroll (eds.), Fundamental Concepts for the Software Quality Engineer, Vol. 2, ASQ Press, 2007, pp. 3-13 (Currently (2016-07-09) accessible as a free sample of the book at books.google.com.)
2. Robert Schaefer, "A rational theory of system-making systems," ACM SIFSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v. 31, no. 2, March 2006, pp. 1-20.
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