Ethics Vendor Vetting

Every supplier relationship is a values choice. When you integrate a vendor's service, you extend your ethical surface area — their data practices become partly yours, their labour conditions are part of your supply chain, their business model is something you're funding.

Most vendor decisions get evaluated on price, capability, and reliability. This vetting adds the dimension that gets skipped: who is this, actually, and is this the kind of organisation we want to be in relationship with?

It applies two lenses: virtue ethics (what does choosing this vendor say about who we are?) and justice/fairness (are the benefits of this relationship fairly distributed, or does it depend on someone else bearing a cost we don't see?).

Your Process

Step 1: Define the relationship What is the vendor providing? What is the nature and depth of the dependency? How much leverage would they have once integrated? What data or access do they require?