Case Study: The manager of a busy information unit at a financial services consultancy had successfully promoted the value and benefits of using the information unit in due diligence and other client-related matters.  So successful had his marketing campaign been that he was inundated with enquiries and requests for research.  His team felt that they simply could not cope with this sudden increased demand.  Moreover, they did not want to refuse to accept new enquiries.  After all, they had specifically promoted the information unit with the implicit request to make more use of it.  At the same time they also felt that they could not do justice to every enquiry with the increasing pressure to provide yet more work.

The information manager and his staff put forward several solutions:

1. They requested that temporary staff be recruited to handle the increased workload. This was agreed and alleviated the problem somewhat, but it was not necessarily the best solution without prior planning.

2. The information unit’s staff made a concerted effort to prioritise incoming work appropriately, explaining to each client that their workload was particularly heavy and that deadlines may need to be relaxed slightly.

3. The information staff inevitably reached points where an unsatisfactory backlog of work developed. In those cases they made every effort to keep the clients informed of the progress of their enquiries, maintaining a high standard of integrity with the clients.

4. Where it could not be resolved how to handle two essential enquiries when there was time and other resources for only one, the manager politely refused to undertake one but instead referred the client to another source of information - perhaps a public library or specialist organisation. The manager felt it important to satisfy his clients’ requests to the best of his ability and not to fail the rest of the employing organisation as a result of his department’s shortcomings. But in doing this he was forced to accept that his employer may view this as a professional failing: another dilemma therefore arose.

5. It was agreed that when marketing the information unit in the future, consideration be given to the likelihood of understaffing or over-utilisation beforehand.

The editors comment...

The information manager's initial actions - to market the services and resources of his information unit - was a well intentioned but perhaps, in retrospect, a foolhardy decision if he was not prepared for such increased demands.  Whilst we cannot fault his best intention to provide a better service to the firm and its clients, and perhaps to attempt provide learning and development opportunities for his team, we may suggest that in this case the information manager seems not to have considered the wider ethical landscape.  Indeed he has a duty of care and of service not only to his employer and colleagues, and to his subordinates and the clients of the firm, but to the collective of those stakeholders.  The interdependencies of those stakeholders and his actions have given rise to an ethical shortcoming in this case, exemplifying perhaps a more complicated situation for the information professional to be aware of.

Despite the principal shortcoming of not taking a wider view of his actions, the information manager and his staff have made a brave attempt at finding solutions.  And although we cannot fault some of these solutions from an ethical perspective (for example, keeping clients informed, prioritising incoming work, offering alternative resources), we sense that in proposing a commercial solution to increased workload (taking on temporary staff) the information manager risks creating further ethical dilemmas.

Created: v0.9 01-Oct-05 : JG-T.

Revised: v0.91 15-Oct-06 : JG-T.  v1.0 09-Jun-07 : JG-T.  v1.1 14-Jun-07 : JG-T