This article investigates the development of Information Communication Technology (ICT) as a global profession with a specific focus on the role of ethics. It addresses three main issues: to what extent ethics contribute to the development of the professional identity of ICT practitioners; what practices and policies can promote the development of ICT ethics; how these practices and policies can usefully be coordinated internationally. Within the European policy framework, professional ethics is seen as one of the four pillars of ICT professionalism, along with: competences; bodies of knowledge; education and training. A diverse range of international stakeholders were consulted on how to develop and implement ethical frameworks in culturally and economically diverse regions. Findings include the need to: be sensitive to the cultural and economic factors of different regions; integrate work on ethics with other aspects of professionalism; promote multiple types of engagement with professional ethics.

By understanding knowledge to be performative – a ‘dynamic and ongoing social accomplishment’, rather than a representation or commodity – we view knowledge, or more accurately ‘knowing’, as a capability that emerges from, is embodied by, and embedded in recurrent social practices. The fluent knowing-in-practice that distinguishes an expert practitioner from a novice is developed through the reflexive interaction of the practitioner with their peers and their real-life work practices . Our key aim in this research was to explore whether it is possible for the abstracted classroom setting to approximate real-life work contexts, thereby enabling the active physical, mental, and emotional engagement of learner/practitioners within their community of practice, which have been demonstrated in the literature to be central to learning. How might training programmes actively engage learners in this way? We explored these questions through focus groups and interviews with participants on a professional IT management training programme and found that real-life contexts can be approximated to an extent, such that learner/ practitioners are enabled to learn from their own and each other’s experience of addressing issues in relation to IT management.

As our dependency on ever-more complex, opaque, and ubiquitous information and communication technologies (ICTs) increases, ethical concerns about the development of those technologies are also rising. One approach to mitigate these concerns is to improve the maturity of the ICT profession through codification of its knowledge base and professional ethics. In this paper, some key theoretical approaches to ethics with a long-established tradition within Philosophy are explored and how these approaches may manifest in the codification of knowledge within ICT Bodies of Knowledge (BoKs) is discussed. BoKs provide a common vocabulary and knowledge inventory to aid communication and encourage shared values and practices, particularly in emerging professional areas such as the ICT profession. Thus, identifying and understanding how ethics are codified in ICT BoKs is important for maturing ICT professional practice in general, and more specifically, for the resolution of ethical concerns. This paper 1) explores considerations and approaches to how ethics are incorporated within ICT BoKs, and 2) conducts content analysis on how ethics are codified within the content structure of ICT Boks.  It is found that theoretical ethical approaches are rarely explicated cited in BoKS though, in the more mature BoKs, the discussion of ethics does include consideration of most of the major philosophical approaches. The implications of how knowledge about ethics is described and integrated into the wider knowledge infrastructure of the ICT profession including curriculum guidelines and accreditation processes is discussed. In a wider contribution to the Knowledge Management discipline, potential lessons to increase maturity for other emerging professions through the development of BoKs are also outlined.