3 Key Aspects to Consider when Analyzing Trust in Business Collaborations
When talking about trust in collaborative business processes, we have to keep one simple question in mind:
“Who trusts whom for what?”
In the first part of this article series we introduced collaborative business processes. In such processes independent organizations have to work together. This causes a lot of uncertainty. And whenever there is uncertainty, there is a need for trust.
When we want to transport perishable goods like vaccines across the globe, these goods need to be cooled. Only the carrier currently in possession of the parcel can influence if the parcel is being cooled. From an outside perspective, there is no physical way to control what the carrier does. This causes uncertainty.
Getting back to “who trusts whom for what” we can describe this uncertainty regarding the following dimensions:
- Uncertainty root: What causes the uncertainty?
- Process component: Where in the process is the uncertainty located?
- Trust concern: What exactly is the uncertainty?
In the perishable goods supply chain example, the truck driver who delivers the parcel is the root of uncertainty. The process component is the activity of delivering the parcel. And the trust concern is the integrity of the activity, meaning is the activity done correctly.
After describing the general uncertainty, we need to look at it from a particular perspective. Different actors that are involved in the process are willing to accept different uncertainties in a process.
For example, a carrier for ground delivery and a carrier for air freight have different uncertainty tolerances than the sender. The ground carrier does not care if the parcel gets too warm after they hand over the parcel. But for the sender, it is important that it is cooled the whole way.
With this simple schema, we can now identify what uncertainties are and where they are located in a process. With the perspective, we can determine which uncertainties are relevant for certain actors. The “who trusts whom for what” schema is the base we need to make trust in any process better.
We will discuss how you can use blockchain to do so in the next article in this series.
Previous article of this series: Silver Bullet for all Trust Issues? How Blockchain Really Helps Businesses Collaborate
About this series: This series is based on the scientific paper
Müller, Marcel, Nadine Ostern, and Michael Rosemann. “Silver bullet for all trust issues? Blockchain-based trust patterns for collaborative business processes.” International Conference on Business Process Management. Springer, Cham, 2020. Download it for free here.
About the author: Marcel Müller is a German deep tech entrepreneur and researcher with a passion for bringing innovations from research to the market. He is the CEO of JadenX, a company that develops deep tech innovations together with partners. Marcel is also the founder of KnowledgeX, a paradigm-changing data science marketplace that uses blockchain and trusted execution environments for trusted collaboration. Furthermore, Marcel is a researcher at SNET at TU Berlin.
