Steering the Digital Shift: Leaders Managing Ethical Debt in the Age of Accelerated Digital Transformation for the IT Sector

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been a rapid shift in the organisation towards Digital. Transformation Front. This shift has been primarily driven by competitive gains in international markets. More likely similar to “Technical Debt”, this paper focuses on “Ethical Debt”, which is related to the pace at which technological adoption takes place, at times outpacing the development of robust ethical values or considerations. "Ethical Debt"—the accumulated cost of deferred moral considerations, such as data privacy gaps, algorithmic bias, and transparency deficits, incurred during accelerated digitalisation. Much like technical debt, ethical debt provides short-term agility at the expense of long-term organisational integrity and public trust. Through this paper, research explores how these “moral liabilities” leaders could identify and mitigate. This paper, through multi multi-disciplinary lens, tries to identify the need for alterations in traditional governance models to address the issues with Generative AI and the Automation framework. Through this paper, we propose a proactive Leadership Framework for Ethical Redress, which shifts the focus from reactive compliance to an "Ethics-by-Design" approach. The key findings of this paper will try to highlight the need for a deliberate shift towards ethical accountability, as well as the social and financial cost to remediate these Digital setbacks else potential failures of digital transformation are at higher risk. This paper concludes by offering integration of a robust policy framework that contributes to the core of digital strategy, ensuring that the drive for transformation does not come at the cost of human-centric values.