Ethics and Knowledge From Technical Colleges

Vision Statement The author of this report has been asked to create a vision statement. The vision statement should be for a technical university. It should be no more than two sentences. The overall depth, breadth and goal of the vision should be communicated in no more than four pages. The vision statement must be characteristic of a transformational leader and it must differentiate the employee and student minds from the market.

While crafting a good vision statement can be difficult in some ways, there are some common threads and trends than can and should be used. Vision Statement The role and goal of Acme Technical College is to inspire, teach and impart the knowledge and inspiration to create and uphold the technologies and ideals of the future.

Only through innovation, strong leadership and ethical fortitude can we find the best way forward for both higher education and organizations that make use of technical solutions and this all shall be taught in a way that is superior to similar schools and avenues of learning. Vision Statement Explained While there are only two sentences in the vision statement above, there are a lot of moving parts and they shall be explained throughout the duration of this report. The first word that can be focused on is inspire.

It is important that the students of a technical college know the importance they have when it comes to disseminating information, protecting that same information and allowing it to be used and harnessed in a way that is effective and enduring for society as a whole. The next word is teach. Technical skills are not something that anyone can just pick up a book and impart to others.

Indeed, the best people to teach and extend technical skills are the ones that have "been there, done that" rather than people that have been in an academic ivory tower. Private sector firms are not the only ones that can be useful in teaching the next generation. Non-profits and public agencies, each for their own reasons, have their own knowledge that they can impart because they operate in a similar yet different way in their own right.

Regardless, technology students can be inspired and taught how to do their job well, the ethics behind the job and why things should be done a certain way. At the same time, things are meant to change, evolve and improve over time. When a new way to think and act reveals itself, it should be considered. If it makes sense to change the landscape, the change should be made.

Indeed, privacy was not a huge concern for much of the existence of the United States, especially not in the technical sense. However, the emergence of the internet and how it can be wielded in invasive ways has led to the realization that privacy matters. The second sentence seizes on the three main pillars of what the future should look like from an ethical, technological and innovation standpoint. Of course, change for change's sake is not a good thing. However, change for the right reasons is absolutely worth the price.

Further, the vision statement makes clear that Acme is meant to be an elite school when it comes to all of the above. After all, how can one explain how firms like Home Depot and Target have been so viciously exploited from an information security standpoint despite the fact that they presumably had the resources to have the people, hardware and software on hand to protect the information that they had on file. It is obvious that they were going "cheap" in one or more ways.

Acme and schools like it need to prepare people in a way so that they know what is necessary keep data protected. Saving money is all well and good but it cannot be at the price of safety. At the same time, it should not be at the cost of the security of the information that firms like Target, Home Depot and TJX were supposed to be protecting.

However, whether it be due to incompetence or ignorance, they could not or would not do so and they paid a heavy price (Robinson, 2014). Ethical fortitude can be a very finicky thing to define. Indeed, there has always been the idea that personal ethics can butt heads with professional ethics. At the same time, there are ethics surrounding things like law enforcement, crime and terrorism.

There is even the concept of not invading the privacy of employees even if they are using company equipment and have been duly warned that their activities on the same are subject to monitoring. Even bigger questions arise when it comes to real-world situations where any of the above is tested in the public eye. One of the things mentioned above is terrorism and Apple is facing a conundrum in that regarded. Apparently, two terrorists that shot up a community center in San Bernardino, California had Apple iPhones.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has tried to order Apple to break the encryption on the phones. Not only did Apple say "no," they also said that they intentionally did not design such a power and they did not do so because they did not want to give any single person that much power. It is questions, ideas and concepts like this that required the best and brightest minds.

A balance has to be struck between protecting the country and people in it and/or preventing people from using technology as a tool to thwart people that would stop them and protecting the privacy of customers (Kaplan, 2016). Another problem that is not overtly stated in the vision statement but that is present nonetheless is the fact that many schools are churning out graduates in the name of money rather than really teaching them what they need to know.

Schools that are de facto degree mills or are otherwise "graduating" people that are ill-prepared to do their job and do it well are a disservice to the wider technological community and that sort of behavior will lead to incidents like Target and Home Depot's breaches happening again and again. As noted before, the people that are graduating from technical schools must know what they are doing, what to do and when and why all of the above occurs.

If any of those pieces are missing, it can lead to major problems when it comes to data security and the way that data is used. As for the transformational leader part of the equation, there is a time and a place for transactional and other types of leadership. However, the college and other scholarly spheres need to be more about innovation and inspiration. This does not mean that college kids should be given a "pie in the sky" attitude about their job.

They need to know that it is a field that is for people.