Every person knows this feeling.

• You book a holiday.
• You open a bank account.
• You use a mobile app.
• You join a loyalty programme.
• You visit a website.

Each interaction comes with an invisible transaction.

Your information in exchange for a service.

Most of us have become so accustomed to this arrangement that we rarely question it. Instead, we ask whether the organisation is trustworthy.

But perhaps we are asking the wrong question.

Why am I expected to trust everyone in the first place?

As both consumers and business leaders, we operate in a world where organisations routinely collect information they must then protect, govern, justify, audit and eventually delete.

The more digital our society becomes, the more responsibility is placed on organisations to behave correctly with increasingly large volumes of personal information.

This creates a cycle that every executive understands:

• More data creates more risk.
• More risk creates more controls.
• More controls create more cost.
• More cost creates more complexity.

The first ICCA paper explores a different perspective.

Instead of asking how organisations should protect information, it asks whether some information needs to be visible to organisations at all.

For a start-up, this raises an interesting possibility.

What if customer trust was not built through policies, terms and conditions, and compliance statements?

What if trust was built into the design itself?

For established organisations, the question is more challenging.

How much operational effort exists today simply because information is visible?

How many controls, audits, security programmes, privacy initiatives, governance frameworks and regulatory obligations are consequences of that visibility?

As executives, we often focus on improving trust.

Perhaps the more important question is whether systems can be designed to require less trust in the first place.

That is not just a technology question.

• It is a business question.
• It is a governance question.

And increasingly, it may become a competitive question.

The paper is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence to encourage discussion, challenge, adaptation and further development.

Paper: ICCA: The Architectural Core

#Leadership #Trust #RiskManagement #Governance #DigitalTransformation #CustomerTrust #Innovation #FutureOfTechnology #CreativeCommons #ICCA