MGMT7020 Chap.14 Disruptive Technology, Virtualisation and Ethics
Disruptive Technology, Virtualisation and Ethics
Technology futures
The final teaching week covers disruptive technologies, virtualisation and ethics.
This chapter explains the standard account of disruptive innovation and how virtualisation underpins cloud computing, with the management questions each raises.
Ethics as governance
It then works an ethical analysis of an automated eligibility tool and offers five questions to ask before deploying AI, showing how most ethical failures are failures of ordinary governance.
Preparing for the conversation
The information technology conversation covers the whole module and then your own video, so this chapter is a good place to rehearse linking topics.
Disruption raises strategy questions, virtualisation raises ownership and availability questions, and ethics asks who bears the cost of both. Practise moving between them with one example you know well.
Common errors on this topic
A common error is to call any new technology disruptive. In the standard account, disruption has a specific pattern of entry at the low end or in a new market.
On ethics, the frequent weakness is a list of general concerns with no stakeholder named, no condition proposed and no person made accountable for outcomes.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Sustaining and disruptive innovation
- 02
Why incumbents miss disruption
- 03
Hypervisors and virtual machines
- 04
Cloud computing management questions
- 05
Stakeholder-based ethical analysis
- 06
Questions before deploying AI
Worked example · free
Weigh a facial recognition entry system for a gym chain
- 1Benefit: faster entry and no lost cards; harms: storage of biometric data and the risk of breach or misuse.
- 1Most vulnerable: members who object or whose faces the system recognises less reliably, since they may be refused entry.
- 2Conditions: explicit consent with a card alternative, strict retention limits, security testing, and a named owner for complaints.
Key terms
- Disruptive Innovation
- An innovation that enters at the low end or a new market and later displaces established products.
- Sustaining Innovation
- An improvement along dimensions that existing customers already value.
- Hypervisor
- The software layer that lets one physical machine run several isolated virtual machines.
- Virtual Machine
- A software-defined computer with its own operating system running on shared hardware.
Disruptive Technology, Virtualisation and Ethics FAQ
What makes a technology disruptive rather than just new?
In the standard account, it starts by serving overlooked or low-end customers with something cheaper or simpler, which incumbents rationally ignore, then improves until it takes the mainstream market.
What management questions does virtualisation raise?
Who owns data held by a provider, what availability the contract guarantees, whether running costs really beat the old capital costs, and how a single physical failure might now affect many systems.
How should ethics be handled in a technology decision?
List benefits and harms by stakeholder, look hardest at the least powerful group, and set conditions that make the action defensible, with a named person accountable for outcomes.
Is cloud computing the same as virtualisation?
Not exactly. Virtualisation is the technique of running several isolated virtual machines on shared hardware; cloud computing uses it to rent capacity as a service, so organisations pay for use instead of owning servers.
What makes an AI deployment ethically risky?
Risk concentrates where errors or bias fall on people with little power to challenge them, where data was used without consent, or where nobody is accountable for outcomes. Transparency and human review reduce those risks.
Why might virtualisation increase risk as well as reduce cost?
Because many systems now share the same physical hardware and often the same provider. A single hardware failure, misconfiguration or provider outage can affect several services at once, so availability planning and contract terms matter more than they did with separate servers.
How can a technology decision be both efficient and ethical?
By naming who gains and who bears the costs, testing for unequal effects before launch, keeping a human review for decisions that harm people, explaining how to contest outcomes, and assigning an owner to monitor results after deployment.
Why do incumbent firms often miss disruptive technologies?
Because the new technology first appeals to low-end or new customers, at lower margins, while the incumbent's best customers do not want it. Investing in it looks unattractive until it improves enough to compete in the mainstream market, by which time it may be too late.
Exam move
Prepare one disruption example from an article you have read and one ethical analysis you can deliver in under a minute, each with a clear condition or limit. Write each example on one card with the benefit, the risk and your condition.
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