Digital Information Expert

Building Digital Trust

Rules of Play

The Race for Digital Trust is On–and the USA is on the Sidelines

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digital trustIn late 2015, in the very first chapter of my recent book, I discuss how China and its consortia of public and private sector assets have established dominant leadership in understanding and building digital trust.  But that analysis now almost seems quaint, if not archaic.

Globally, governments and industry are moving toward achieving digital trust with one notable exception–the United States is so unfocused on trust, particularly across government services and online commerce, that the nation, its citizens, and its businesses, cannot even be considered to be in the game or on the field.

China’s Recent Initiatives

In China, since 2015, we are seeing markers that may not be completely comforting to some.  For example, transparency is a vital condition … Read More

Exploring the Unified Information Model

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Earlier today, a reader of my book presented to me a good question: “Why did you feel we needed the Unified Information Model given the initiatives on the Semantic Web and the Dublin Core metadata standards?” There is nothing like a good question with which to start the day!

The Problems to be Solved
When you are looking for information, you do so with a task of Work that is before you to complete. You may need to make a business decision, you may be researching to answer specific questions about how well a marketing campaign is working, or you may evaluating whether a potential joint venture partner is accurately reporting their performance. But, in every instance, we seek information … Read More

Can You Find the Rules to Calculate Trust?

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A key principle in modern democracies is that the rule of law is known.  Statutes, regulations, court decisions, agency deliberations, and even the minutes of Federal Reserve meetings are published and made available.  The operating premise is that, if the rules are accessible, civil order and social continuity will be strengthened and the conduct of those violating the rules is more easily prosecuted.  The old saying that “Ignorance of the law is no excuse” rests on an important premise—the law must be published and accessible.  The Internet has made much of the content of the rule of law even more accessible.

This morning, while grading a discussion forum about privacy notices, a rather big issue came into focus: how can … Read More

There is No Court in the Cloud—How Will Bad Guys Be Punished?

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digital justice, evidence, rule of law Once again today, the US Department of Justice announced an indictment of individuals in other countries for allegedly criminal behavior. This is becoming a routine exercise. Bad guys conduct digital attacks. Government collect digital evidence of the attacks. Government obtains an indictment. And the story ends. There is no arrest, no prosecution, no trial, and no conviction.

See, the problem with this scenario is that there is no court in the Cloud where there can be a trial! The bad guys are not within the boundaries of the United States. They have not been arrested. There has been no trial in absentia—at least in this country, an accused has a right to confront their accusers and participate in the trial.… Read More

Bike Racing, Transparency, and Digital Trust: How will we prove the cheat?

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In professional cycling, the ultimate cheat is to be pulled along by a team car through a tough moment in the race in order to catch your competition or recover from a calamity—a crash, a flat tire, or even an unexpectedly long response to a call from nature. Each rider is expected to compete with his own power and use that power to overcome the calamities.

Yesterday, in one of the first major one-day races of the cycling season, known as Milan-San Remo, following a somewhat unexpected win by a somewhat unexpected winner, Arnaud Démare, other cyclists complained. Démare had been involved in a crash before a major climb. He was, with others, far behind the front of the race. … Read More

We All Have to Play Within the Rules. Really?

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“We all have to play within the rules.” As I heard those words, I immediately pushed the pause button. Who said them? Robert Herjavec, CEO of Herjavec Group and famous as one of the sharks on Shark Tank. He was being asked on CNBC about the future of startups focusing on data. His response affirmed one of the key design attributes of the Trust Prism, the signature innovation in my book.

The Trust Prism is a visual, 3-D representation of an information system. It enables us to visualize and calculate how trustworthy a system is in its design and operation. The Trust Prism is scalable to large systems, and adaptive to any type of system. But, in every case, a … Read More

Are You Automating Your Rules?

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Business rules engine software has been around for quite awhile.  The primary function of a business rules engine (BRE) is to enable the rules for a business process to be expressed in a manner that enables an application or process to automatically execute the business process pursuant to the rules.  Mysteriously, law schools are continuing to fail to teach their students about the mere existence of BRE tools and their utility and value to enabling legal compliance.

At their most basic, rules composed with BREs are semantic expressions describing what actions are to be performed with respect to an information object.  Like any semantic system, BREs require a vocabulary from which the rules are to be composed and, for each … Read More

How do you trust tradition?

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Once again, the Sunday New York Times provides the stimulus for a post about trust.  This week, an engaging story began with the headline, “Quenching Consumers’ Thirst for ‘Authentic’ Brands”.  The reporting investigated how, particularly for online marketing and sales, retailers and product manufacturers are trying to connect to the vocabulary of “authenticity” and the traditions of the brand that trigger consumer enthusiasm and favoritism in a crowded global marketplace.  Various studies and reports were described in which consumers were shown to find that “traditional Cajun” red beans and rice and “Grandma’s” zucchini cookies triggered more favorable reactions—the diners bought more often and said the products tasted better. 

But, how are these vocabulary selections triggering these reactions?  How does the … Read More

Seeds, Borders, and Trust

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Since last week, the Wall Street Journal story has been haunting me, sitting on my desk awaiting my response.  The story explains how China has sharply dropped the importation of U.S. grain, notably genetically modified varieties that are viewed with considerable concern.  Grain companies are reporting losses of tens of millions of dollars and lawsuits are everywhere because the grain that was grown used seeds for which the genetic composition had not yet been approved by Chinese officials (or, it turns out, the seed control authorities of other nations). 

What is fascinating to me is that we are now seeing the same battles over information—the small packets of data that grow and blossom into knowledge.  National borders are becoming new … Read More

Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and the Demise of Risk Management

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Last week, at the Electronic Signature Records Association (ESRA), I delivered a keynote address that surprised me.  For awhile, I have been advocating that risk management is dead as a business discipline.  Why?  Because RM is only funded out of the net profits of an organization.  When companies seek the monies to meet budget requests for managing risk, their only sources of funds are the monies left over after all the other expenses of producing their goods and services have been spent.  RM spending, as such, does not do anything that increases the value of the goods or services of a company to its customer base.  But it has always been challenging to make that point clearly, and to illuminate … Read More