Suppose you are the manager of Rafael, a system's support team member in your department. His responsibilities are configuring new computers, setting up new networks, monitoring networks, and ensuring that the system is responsive and availability. Rafael is new to his position and recently completed his associate's degree in information systems at the local community college. He is very enthusiastic about his job. Rafael has been assigned the weekend operations shift which is being on call in case of outages and correcting any technical problems to restore service.
Last weekend, Rafael was called by operations support to correct a problem. Rafael logged on and corrected the problem. He decided to make a database backup just in case. When making the back-up, he wanted to ensure that data copied correctly and wrote a data query using the order and salespeople tables. His results turned up an interesting result in that he noticed one of the salespeople's orders always had a total price lower than the other salespeople with the same amount of product. He just noticed it in passing, and was pleased to see that the database was responding normally. He documented his work and headed home.
The next Friday, Rafael went to happy hour and ran into the salesperson who he found in the query with lower totals. He made a joke about "discounting". The salesperson just laughed and said that he "did his job".
The following Monday, your boss called you into his office. He said the SVP of sales had informed him to terminate Rafael due to his "illegal" behavior and actions.
He wants your recommendation on the situation and what action to following.
What is your opinion? Is it illegal, unethical, or neither for Rafael query the data? Does the company share culpability with Rafael? What should you do as Rafael's manager to eliminate these types of situations in the future? What should employees do when odd patterns in data are found?