Digital trust: the advantages of business digitisation
The world around us is constantly changing and the evolution of technologies and lifestyles calls for a replacement of traditional ways of working with new digital-friendly ones, like remote working. Companies must be ready to face this challenge, but how’s the situation? As a matter of fact, today an organisation incapable of adapting quickly to digital evolution and exploiting new technologies seriously puts its future at risk, losing whatever possibility of still successfully competing on the market yet.
Therefore, business digitisation represents a key step for the competitiveness of a company aiming to grow, innovate and optimize processes, no matter the sector or size. This is a revolution following the disruptive wave of digital transformation and involving all areas within a business, in addition to a wide range of digital tools and services to improve productivity, increase efficiency, accelerate growth and balance costs, increase efficiency. Some of these disruptive technologies regard big data (and how to leverage them), artificial intelligence, the internet of things and blockchain.
Of course, business digitisation needs a specific factor enabling the transition to a more agile, flexible and performance-oriented approach in terms of work-ways: that’s digital trust. According to the World Economic Forum it stands for the individuals’ expectation that digital technologies and services (and the organizations providing them) will protect all stakeholders’ interests and uphold societal expectations and values. Clearly, both companies and users wants to trust the digital environment and its technologies, seeing there a trustworthy space for sharing, storing, transferring and using documents, resources and information securely.
Who’s the digital trust expert?
In this scenario, the intervention of a professional such as the digital trust expert is essential to guarantee the integrity and protection of all corporate activities and guide the company on its innovative and cultural transformation journey, in full compliance with current regulations for privacy, security and data protection issues.
The digital trust expert drives company’s digital transformation path, mastering specific skills in the field of cyber and IT security and technological innovation and perfectly knowing the GDPR terms and rulings. In fact, is the one who knows laws, regulations, techniques and technologies to secure the entire information system and create the right balance between the efficient digitisation of business processes and key functions like privacy protection and the security of operations and relations.
But, of course, the role of a Digital Trust Expert must also consider the relationship with the outer audience of consumers that could be potential customers of the company, if they’re not yet. Indeed, Digital Trust aims creating a solid online reputation, building a high level of credibility, adopting safe and reliable services and respecting the privacy of individuals; it’s not surprising that it represents an opportunity to attract new customers and retain all the existing ones.
This specifically means that’s needed to implement security measures to protect against cyber threats and ensure greater transparency on how customer data is collected and used. Hence, it’s possible that the Digital Trust Expert may usually deal with another specialized professional: the Data Protection Officer.
The 4 pillars of Digital Trust within business digitisation
The business digitisation process is a complex journey that requires a structured and systematic approach that takes into account four fundamental pillars, the main elements of Digital Trust enabling organizations to successfully address the new challenges.
Let’s check the four pillars of Digital Trust to understand the importance of the digital transformation within companies and how it affects the survival of a business player:
- Security: users must feel safe when interacting online and this means protecting their data and personal information from cyber threats, using systems such as encryption to ensure the confidentiality of all communications;
- Transparency: users need to know how their personal data will be collected, stored and used, thus companies must be transparent about their practices in this subject and provide clear and concise data privacy policies;
- Reliability: customers want to be able to count on a company that keeps its promises and this means giving accurate and timely information while offering a superior quality service and excellent support in case of potential issues;
- User Experience: if clients experience a good journey when interacting with the company, for example if the products and services achieve what they promise to do while being intuitive and easy to use, the website is fast and quickly load online pages and the transactions are secure, clear and fast, it’s literally automatic that the company will gain greater reliability and credibility on customers’ perspective.
