Integrity refers to being honest and adhering to strong moral principles. It also refers to ensuring the accuracy of data and information. There are two types of integrity - physical integrity, which deals with correctly storing and retrieving raw data, and logical integrity, which ensures data makes sense given its context. Maintaining integrity is challenging because people can rationalize behaviors and there is no single definition of integrity, as it can vary between cultures and individuals. Simply relying on policies and rules is not enough, as integrity requires personal judgment during dilemmas where the choice is not clear-cut.

1. INTEGRITY

2. Definition
• Integrity is the practice of being honest and showing a
consistent and uncompromising adherence to strong moral and
ethical principles and values.In ethics, integrity is regarded as
the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one's actions.
• Integrity refers to the ability to ensure that information being
displayed on a Web site or transmitted or received over the
Internet, has not been altered in any way by an unauthorized
party.

3. • Data integrity is the maintenance of, and the assurance
of the accuracy and consistency of data over its entire life-
cycle, and is a critical aspect to the design,
implementation and usage of any system which stores,
processes, or retrieves data. The term is broad in scope
and may have widely different meanings depending on
the specific context – even under the same general
umbrella of computing. It is at times used as a proxy term
for data quality,while data validation is a pre-requisite for
data integrity. Data integrity is the opposite of data
corruption. The overall intent of any data integrity
technique is the same: ensure data is recorded exactly as
intended (such as a database correctly rejecting mutually
exclusive possibilities,) and upon later retrieval, ensure the
data is the same as it was when it was originally recorded.
In short, data integrity aims to prevent unintentional
changes to information. Data integrity is not to be
confused with data security, the discipline of protecting
data from unauthorized parties.

4. Types of
Integrity
• Physical Integrity
• Logical Integrity

5. Physical
Integrity
• Physical integrity deals with challenges associated with
correctly storing and fetching the data itself.
Challenges with physical integrity may
include electromechanical faults, design flaws,
material fatigue, corrosion, power outages, natural
disasters, acts of war and terrorism, and other special
environmental hazards such as ionizing radiation,
extreme temperatures, pressures and g-forces.

6. Logical
Integrity
• This type of integrity is concerned with
the correctness or rationality of a piece of data, given a
particular context. This includes topics such
as referential integrity and entity integrity in
a relational database or correctly ignoring impossible
sensor data in robotic systems. These concerns involve
ensuring that the data "makes sense" given its
environment. Challenges include software bugs, design
flaws, and human errors. Common methods of
ensuring logical integrity include things such as a check
constraints, foreign key constraints,
program assertions, and other run-time sanity checks.
• Both physical and logical integrity often share many
common challenges such as human errors and design
flaws, and both must appropriately deal with
concurrent requests to record and retrieve data, the
latter of which is entirely a subject on its own.

7. • Morally upright statements, right? But have you ever
wondered why they are needed in the first place?After
all, integrity should be the basic building block for
doing business: Nobody wants to get involved with a
company that lies, cheats, and tricks its customers; nor
do people want to work for a company (or a manager)
that is dishonest and disingenuous with employees. In
other words, integrity should be a given, without the
need to trumpet its existence. As one senior executive
said to me, “Integrity is a threshold characteristic for
our people — if they don’t have it, they aren’t here.”

8. • Yet it’s not that simple, for two reasons: First is the
innate human ability to rationalize behavior. For
example, if you ask high school students whether or
not it is right to cheat, most will say that cheating is
wrong.Yet research suggests that as many as 95% of
such students admit to having engaged in some form
of cheating. Most of the time, this involves a specific
incident where the students had to make a choice. In
hindsight, the students justify the choice as “not really
cheating,” “no big deal,” or something that “everyone
else does.” In other words, they rationalize their
situational behavior, and this way they can still
consider themselves to be honest.

9. • The reality is that all of us (and not just students) face
integrity-based choices on a regular basis. Do we tell
customers about all of the warts on our products? Do
we reveal everything to a prospective buyer during due
diligence? Is it acceptable to hide certain aspects of our
background in a résumé? How much of billable time is
really devoted to a client? How honest should I be
when giving feedback to my boss or subordinate?
None of these situations have clear answers — and no
corporate policy can cover every contingency.As a
result, no matter what choice we make, we can
convince ourselves that it was made with integrity.

10. • And that leads to the second reason why integrity is so
difficult: Everyone defines integrity
differently. Falsifying information to one person might
be considered an acceptable business practice to
another.This is further exacerbated by differences in
culture — for example in some business cultures people
are expected to openly do favors for each other, while
in other cultures those favors would be considered
bribes.

11. • The power of rationalization and the difficulties of
definition reveal integrity as a subject that is neither
easy nor simple.That’s why solely relying on
compliance functions, policies, rules, and audits — the
integrity police — is usually inadequate.These
mechanisms guard against gross and clearly illegal
violations of integrity standards, but they do not deal
with the integrity choices that we face every day.These
choices require personal judgment.

12. • In some ways the value statements about integrity are
meant to remind us that integrity is not just a
corporate responsibility, but a personal one as well. If
you are a manager, you can apply these values by
setting aside time with your team to share integrity
dilemmas and choices and discuss the thinking behind
individuals’ decisions. Make sure these meetings take
place in a “safe” environment, where people can
openly share their thoughts. If you hold these
discussions regularly, you’ll gradually get beyond the
rationalizations and develop more common definitions
of what is acceptable and what is not — which is the
essence of an integrity culture.