The Trust Pillar

This week in the UK has seen a flurry of publicity surrounding the expense claims of Members of Parliament, from all parties.

Most claims are related to allowances to which they are entitled as part of their jobs. But the scandal surrounds the inappropriateness of some of the expenses in relation to the claimants jobs.

The allowances have rules under which MPs should claim, but the publicity has come about as to the extent to which members have stretched the rules. In all rules there are written as well as implicit meanings, and the latter are entrusted to individuals to interpret them with good ethics and morals.

The episode has tarnished all MPs, and has further broken the trust we empower them with to represent us in Parliament. In a bid to win back that trust many MPs are now making public apologies and committing to paying back monies for inappropriate claim items.

Trust is a very powerful thing and a founding pillar of all civilised societies. People and businesses build their reputations on trust.

One company that has built it's business on trust is Salesforce.com. They knew that for them to be successful, people had to believe that their highly sensitive and valuable data would be safe and secure out in the cloud of the Internet. So, the company has to be transparent in its operations and set up a dedicated website - trust.salesforce.com to show the performance of its systems and security state.

When you break people's trust, you can't win it back in an instant. The British MP's cannot believe that by offering to pay back expenses, that somehow people are going to start trusting them again. Trust has to be earnt, and companies such as Salesforce.com run their business on it, for them to break that, in this on demand world, would be the death of them.

There are many SaaS and Cloud Computing companies and the first thing they have to win from potential customers is trust. You can almost forget all other aspects of the relationship in the shadow of that most important pillar.

Careless Talk Costs Lives

This was a poster campaign in the Second World War, and was to raise awareness of talking in public and of who might be listening around you.

After an event that occurred to me today, and thinking back to an incident at IBM, it is frightening to see what people will do in desperation.

Today, I went to register the .com, .co.uk and .net domains for my next business venture only to find out that the .com domain had been registered only four days ago. That's the luck of the draw I hear you say. But what galled me was to find out that the registrant of the domain was none other than the work colleague of someone who had been guiding me with the company set-up. Suffice to say, we can only assume that this colleague over heard part of his telephone conversation outside the building, and decided to spite him by 'nicking' the domain name. So I'm having to deal with trying to buy the .com domain name for my purposes. Thankfully, I know the person concerned and hopefully get them to see sense and sell it to me for little or no profit.

As for the case in IBM. IBM sponsors certain Business Partners to have access badges to the public spaces in their buildings to allow smooth running of their community and facilitation of meetings. Apparently, a couple of years ago IBM had to withdraw all the Business Partner access badges after it was revealed in an investigation, that a Business Partner had acted upon information they had overheard between IBM'ers in a public space that lost them the deal, but won it for the Business Partner. Suffice to say that was a major breach of trust that cost the company financially, inconvenienced the whole Business Partner community and alienated the IBM sales teams toward working with partners.

So think about who's listening, next time you are having a conversation on a train, plane or in a public space.