Trust is precious, delicate, sensitive, difficult to build and easy to lose. Trust makes the world go around – not money! The first banks were created on trust (check out The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson) and the last banks will disappear because trust evaporated (check out BlockChain!).
But we are putting the cart before the horse here because first and foremost you need to have a product or service to sell or offer for free if you are a NfP organisation. And we all agreed for a few good years now that our most valuable work-currency is information, knowledge, insight and organisational memory. Why? Because that’s how we create value (measurable or perceived) in the form of products, which in turn, we exchange for universally accepted value units: fiat currency, cryptocurrency etc.). Argument closed? Not so fast! For this chain to work efficiently, effectively and flawlessly, you will need to trust every step of the way and every decision. How do we do that?
Let’s start by the negatives: how do we lose trust? Well, it depends. At operational level any broken processes or lack of awareness by employees would challenge and lower trust. At organisational level, matters are a bit different. We need to have macroscopic clarity, context awareness and reassurances that if the tactical details need to be challenged, the capability in doing so is there.
Not easy to achieve and sustainably maintain trust, is it? We need help and we get it in spades from so many IT and Digital systems: ERP for process management, CRM for customer management, DM for document management and so on. We now have RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to help us and Artificial Intelligence to un-tangle and simplify our processes, organise our knowledge and maintain our organisational memory.
Sadly, this reality translates to lots of expenditure, more confusion instead of clarity and importantly, it raises a barrier of entry to young professionals and SMEs because they do not have the capital to support the up-front costs.
And we have another problem! Our market research points to more than 60% of professionals which depend on information, have to access and search in more than 4 systems (applications) every time they need to form a view and before taking action on a task. That’s a big issue for 2 key reasons. First, we lose a lot of time and we get frustrated in the process. Secondly, trying to consolidate facts extracted from all these systems to one, cohesive and complete story (case) in our mind before making a decision is very, very hard.
This is crazy! How can we possibly build and maintain trust under these conditions? How can we be expected to have constant awareness, clarity, currency of information and all these in real-time and within the context of our activities?
That’s what we un-did at i4cu! We peeled away all the clutter, any unnecessary tech and costs which do not add true value and do not help build trust. We focused on what matters to all of us: get the full story of any activity we work on, in real time, arranged on a timeline that we can relate to and no information gaps. In other words, you do not miss anything and you know why things happened, when and by whom. This is powerful. This suppresses your risk and your uncertainties. This builds and maintains trust.
