Today’s digital economy is driven by innovation. The companies that are able to find new ways to serve their customers, often enabled by implementation of emerging technologies, are the ones best positioned to thrive.
However, the nimble approaches to product development and willingness to quickly shift business models to support innovation comes with significant risk. Corners cut in a rush to market can lead to compliance violations, data breaches and products that simply do not do what they are supposed to, doing long-term damage to companies’ reputations.
That is why it has become essential for organizations to prioritize digital trust as an essential foundation of their transformation projects. In a recent ISACA survey centered on digital trust, 97 percent of respondents say digital trust is important to digital transformation, with a combined 76 percent indicating it is “extremely” or “very” important.
While it is good news that industry professionally recognize that digital trust and digital transformation should go hand-in-hand, truly achieving digital trust remains a challenge. Consider that only one in five respondents say that their board of directors has identified digital trust as a priority and only 28 percent say they have complete understanding of how their job contributes to digital trust, and it is apparent there is much education still to be done.
An important baseline is for enterprise leaders to socialize a shared understanding of what digital trust means. ISACA considers digital trust to be the confidence in the integrity of the relationships, interactions and transactions among suppliers/providers and customers/consumers within an associated digital ecosystem. While many people associate digital trust with cybersecurity and avoiding data breaches, digital trust is much more encompassing, also including aspects such as governance, privacy, audit, ethics, transparency and quality.
Simona Rollinson, ISACA’s chief operating officer, has spearheaded several technology-focused transformation projects in her career, including the recent implementation of a new association management system at ISACA. She emphasizes the critical connection between trust and successful transformation.
“Digital transformation strategy flips historical business delivery models into one that prioritizes digital engagement, digital interactions and the use of digital products and services,” Simona said. “Digital trust is critical to organizations as the number of organizations and customers engaging digitally rises. As such, business and technology leaders must ensure that the organization’s technology instills confidence, as when there is trust in customer interaction, customer satisfaction and business outcomes are improved.”
Many digital transformation projects fail when they are treated as one-off projects rather than part of a continuous journey. This is another reason digital trust, as an overarching North Star, can make digital transformation efforts more successful. Maintaining digital trust calls for an iterative process in which enterprises constantly evaluate their practices and adjust them when areas for improvement are identified. Regularly monitoring, auditing and measuring digital trust practices ensures that major organizational initiatives – such as technology-driven transformation projects – are responsibly and sustainably implemented.
A holistic digital trust mindset should underpin how organizations approach digital transformation. As Marco Vernocchi, Ernst & Young’s global chief data officer, said, “Trust is fundamental in a digital world. Given the ongoing and exponential growth of data, intelligence that can be trusted by customers, employees, business partners and regulators is a new condition for success. Trust creates confidence and accelerates the adoption of new digital experiences; scale creates business relevance and ultimately success. If you try adding trust on top of your business and operating models you end up with compliance, but if you build trust into them, you create sustainable value.”
Sustainable is such an important word as organizations consider their digital transformation objectives. The only way to reliably achieve success in the long-term in today’s digital economy is a cross-functional commitment to creating and preserving digital trust. As technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and cloud platforms continue to mature, the imperative for organizations to recalibrate their business models to support rapid innovation will only increase. By viewing these transformation projects through the broader lens of digital trust, organizations will be able to attain one of the most elusive – and valuable – prizes in today’s volatile business environment: their customers’ trust.