Blog | 18 Oct 2024

Champions needed: Building Digital trust in a dangerous world

Daniel Filippi

Research Associate, Thought Leadership

Digital trust—the belief across a digital ecosystem that interactions are secure, transparent, and accountable—is essential to businesses in the online era. A significant uptick in the volume of data and its importance, the growing interconnectedness of the world, and the rise of sophisticated bad actors have now prompted companies to rethink their approaches to it.

Recent research from Oxford Economics in collaboration with SGTech shows that digital trust, once considered the purview of IT and cybersecurity, now stretches beyond those traditional roles to all parts of an organization, requiring a highly trained workforce that has both technical and more general digital business skills. Supported by such a workforce, organizations can work toward building the trust and confidence of suppliers, business partners, and customers across the digital value chain.

But businesses must overcome the challenges of cross-functional management. That means prioritizing and cultivating a strong organizational culture around digital trust that is underpinned by a clearly defined strategy and leadership (other success factors include targeted initiatives to build skill and implementation of processes and supporting technology).

There is no one-size-fits-all approach. We found that while organizations need a “digital champion” to lead the charge on digital trust and ensure coordination across the business, approaches vary; that leader could be a CIO, a Chief Digital Officer, or perhaps a Chief Trust Officer—a dedicated role with growing popularity. Smaller businesses often opt to have multiple champions embedded throughout the organization who coordinate with each other to ensure that digital trust becomes engrained in the company culture.

Digital Trust Pioneers—leading organizations that have taken the most action across the key focus areas—are ahead in all aspects of digital trust, as well as being better prepared for future challenges, such as preparing for the opportunities and challenges of generative AI.

Unfortunately, though, only about half of the companies we surveyed have a champion in place—a sign of progress in this emerging discipline but still a far cry from where businesses need to be. Organizations that have not yet assigned a champion, or champions, should reconsider and accelerate their efforts.

Leadership will be even more essential as digital trust takes on fresh urgency in the face of growing AI investments. Threat actors already are using AI to increase the cadence, sophistication, and severity of cyberattacks. With steadfast and well-defined leadership, organizations can build a strong culture around digital trust that will help businesses not only navigate the rise of AI responsibly and ethically but also protect digital transactions more thoroughly in an ever-connected world.

To unlock more insights on the steps to take in building a resilient digital trust workforce:

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