Here are some best practices that can strengthen businesses that have pivoted digitally but lack a strong, defined trust framework.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, organizations have realized the urgent need to strengthen continuity and resilience.

Disruption, particularly across value chains, has spurred accelerated digital transformation, resulting in the rise of digital ecosystems that leverage platforms to deliver scale, speed, and make sense of data across a connected network.

A digital-first strategy is key to pivot back to steady business growth and rebuilding trust, but in a landscape where governments struggle to keep pace with technology, and data grows faster than it can be controlled, businesses are looking to future-proof and build digital resilience.

Resilience helps firms to mitigate their risks and adapt to changes. Findings from IDC’s Worldwide ICT Spending Guide: Industry and Company Size have indicated that the importance of digital resilience is expected to increase ICT spending by enterprises in the Asia Pacific region (excluding Japan) by over 7.1% to reach US$1.1Tn by 2025.

At the same time, a recent IDC survey has showed growing privacy concerns and regulatory scrutiny as businesses shift online. Some respondents even described their ecosystem as largely limited to just “buyer-seller” relationships with vendors and service providers, and 18.2% believed their ecosystem was “largely transactional”. Is this the right way to instil trust in stakeholders?

Linking digital trust and resilience

In the quest for ongoing digital innovation, a defining characteristic of a mature and effective ecosystem is the need to broker trust.

Amid more frequent and volatile disruptions as the entire global economy undergoes digital transformation, investing in a trusted ecosystem that is resilient is a necessity. By doing this, businesses big or small can maneuver any unforeseen challenges and emerge from crises stronger.

How can businesses prioritize the concept of digital trust and resilience? This can be done by imperatively prioritizing the perspectives of three elements: people, data, and systems. This will ensure that trust is secured at every level.

Establishing trust is a win-win for all stakeholders to ensure integrity in transactions, quick and considered decision-making, and a high level of confidence in each other’s organizations. Digital resilience is a key part of the ‘trust framework’, because organizational trust increases with the confidence that corporate partners are able to cope with disruptions and crises.

How to boost digital resilience

As a matter of survival and growth, many businesses have probably already adopted the mindset and ingredients necessary for resilience.

The challenge is to making the right technological tweaks to enhance effectiveness. While gaining resilience can feel like a difficult upheaval (especially for those that have been operating in a more traditional, bureaucratic style) businesses can develop and nurture a trusted ecosystem with these best practices:

  • Adopt an effective IT services catalog that empowers digital ecosystems to ensure availability of all technologies and standards
  • Define KPIs, including partner risks and the value of risks mitigated, that drive investment and enablement
  • Always designing with availability, flexibility, scalability and security considerations
  • Actively monitor and assess your ecosystem to identify potential points of failure early
  • Aim for the gold standard in digital transformation by becoming an enterprise that adopts an outside-in approach
  • Leverage your ecosystem of stakeholders, including customers, partners, employees, and communities, to dynamically evolve your business model

These best practices can knit a tighter ecosystem based on trust and resilience that will strengthen every stakeholder in the new digital future.