Trust Networks Needed for Productivity, Profit

Exploring the push to establish trust networks as part of the next evolution in the Web.

Building “trust networks” that allow individuals and employees to integrate social media into their daily activities is the next big step in the growth of the Internet, a Booz Allen Hamilton executive told attendees at the Gov 2.0 Summit September 10, 2009.

“[T]he ability to create a trusted service context between service provider and user represents the highest value, lowest cost, lowest risk model for the Web-enabled world,” said Booz Allen Senior Vice President Lloyd Howell.

The evolution of the Web has followed the money, Howell said, framing his remarks in the context of what is ostensibly Washington's most famous political movie, “All the President's Men.” When government and corporations first utilized the Internet, “it began with the Web serving as a low-cost publishing platform, allowing businesses to put information out to customers. We all built sites that are now referred to as 'brochure-ware.'”

As the potential for connecting customers to companies became clearer, organizations began to build “virtual storefronts,” Howell said, creating new two-way interactions. The expansion of cloud computing arose as enterprises began to seek ways to reduce the cost of computing, or improve the return on investment from the infrastructure already in place.

But over the past five years, a new ROI measurement has emerged, “the push to find more and more individual value and benefit, … driven by the rapid manner in which individuals are adopting digital technologies to meet their own needs and desires,” Howell said. “The challenge, however, is that as more and more users go to the cloud, as more and more services and applications move to the cloud, the risk to individuals and organizations rises. Every week we seem to hear about another data breach, or another attack on [an] application or service.”

It is this risk factor, “an economic force in its own right,” that is powering the push to establish trust networks, Howell said. He hailed the announcement by the OpenID Foundation of pilot programs to initiate Open Trust Frameworks.

“I think that we will look back on this step as the beginning of the next great evolution in the Web,” he said.

story posted September 14, 2009