The students at NEOMA’s TEMA programme had the opportunity to benefit from the experience of Jean Leviste, senior consultant at Sopra Steria Next, which specialises in digital ethics issues.

As part of their course Digital technology law and entrepreneurship taught by lawyer Stéphanie Van Oostende, Jean Leviste, a senior consultant at Sopra Steria Next spoke during a three-hour class and then fielded questions from the fifth-year TEMA students. He told us about his approach, which is part of the third year of the partnership signed between NEOMA and the digital transformation specialist consulting firm.

Why speak with the students?

As future company managers, TEMA students are those who are going to focus on digital technology, shape it, and sometimes implement it as well.

I wanted to offer them a reflective framework so they can adopt a critical point of view on the nature, methods and impact of the projects that they will implement.

It’s not enough to just think about digital strategies, develop websites and apply digital tools. The concept must be integrated into a much larger approach.

Ultimately, the challenge concerns structuring the daily work of future managers through good practices and helping them to anticipate the impacts of digital technology.

What place will digital ethics have in the professional future of our students?

The question of digital ethics holds an increasingly important place in companies. In the future, it will not only concern the recruits of digital transformation firms. Each professional at each level of the value chain will have to take into account the impact and challenges of their actions when using or applying digital technology, so as to implement it correctly and stay on top of the regulations, which go beyond just compliance. That goes for overall performance challenges and the meaning behind the actions taken.

These skills will thus be highly sought after and valued in the future by every type of company. It is a real opportunity for TEMA students, who can stay ahead of the curve and strengthen their employability!

Did you provide them with any tools?

The goal of this course is to make students understand that ethics is affected by relativity, and that they will have to establish a core set of values to use every day in their approach and actions. To illustrate this, I presented to them a concrete task carried out on an ethical basis by Sopra Steria Next in 2020-2021 on the concept of predictive justice.

The pedagogic challenge had two aspects to it: develop their digital ethics culture and help them systemise their reasoning. To achieve this, I proposed two major mnemonic devices to them:

• The 3 U’s: Is the object that I am deploying useful, useable and used?
• The questions to ask yourself:

1. Is the situation that I’ve encountered problematic?
2. If so, what type of problem is it?
3. Do I always have to aim towards a technological solution (for example, can certain purely organisational solutions work instead?)
4. What is the necessary level of technology?
5. Who are the right people to deploy it?

The students at the TEMA programme at NEOMA thus received a preview of the courses on digital ethics, which are really applied in the professional world, created by Sopra Steria Next for all of its consultants.