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In our continuing series on the transformation of our institution into a powerful and competitive partner in Industry 4.0 ecosystems, [1] [2] [3] we now discuss the next lesson learned in the review of this process [2] [4]:

Second lesson: Digital trust will make or break many attempts at transformation

We begin by exploring a few different perspectives on digital trust. Back in 2013, PWC Singapore identified emerging technological trends that would have a direct impact on digital trust. [5] These trends were: Social Media, Mobile Devices, Data Analytics, Cloud Storage, Hyper-connectivity, Digital Identity, and the Speed of Change. Over the past five years these items have all maintained or increased their importance in considering the construction of digital trust. To face these challenges, PWC identified three major priorities:

·      Acquiring digital expertise in Boards of Directors and Executives to empower them to ask the right questions and establish proper accountability with regards to digital risk

·      Rethinking the approach to technological risk to be able to manage these risks dynamically with cutting edge knowledge and understanding

·      Building a business strategy for the new digital future rather than merely append a digital strategy. This kind of business strategy will promote innovation, collaboration, and require decision-making at speeds never seen before by the enterprise.

KPMG released its own survey of digital trust in 2015, identifying as the key components to digital trust as [6]: Reliability, Credibility, Transparency, Integrity, and Security.

The Harvard Business Review very recently published a review of 4 dimensions of digital trust across 42 different countries. [7] In that survey, Mexico is ranked about average when measuring how users feel about their digital environment and the mechanisms for building trust and their robustness. Mexico ranked low with respect to how users respond to frictions within their digital experiences and how users experience the digital trust environment.

A common thread between the KPMG and the PWC reports cited has been the need to focus on building the digital data infrastructure and becoming masters at data analytics. [4] [5] [6] The personnel and infrastructure must be in place to be nimble, innovative, and creative in building the digital ecosystem in which our students, faculty, donors, and partners can feel integrated, listened to, safe, and informed. Powerful data analytics can lead to powerful insights and data mining for new strategies and focuses. In the next paper we will discuss the personnel issue specifically.

While these lessons and suggestions form a core set of concepts to consider when laying out the digital strategy for UPAEP, it is equally important to note success stories and examples as inspiration and support for future developments:

·      The iideas ecosystem has certainly been an interesting case study in this area [1], but UPAEP has done many more very positive things along this digital trust focus.

·      The admissions process has had many unnecessary processes trimmed out and has streamlined the paperwork submission system to a digital-only form for the initial admissions decision. In Mexico’s “original paperwork”-obsessed legal and cultural climate, this is no small task or achievement – and has greatly reduced the workload and stress associated with putting together an admissions packet.

·      Internal university communications have seen a giant leap forward with the COMÚNICA platform, allowing a simpler and more streamlined platform for personnel to make university events publicly known and available, and with standardized graphical rules has reduced the tediousness of review and adjustment of individual promotional materials to be used at the many different digital interfaces the university maintains. The daily communications digest has seen continuous improvements in its design and format.

·      The university continues to foster trust by allowing faculty the freedom to carry out their duties unbound by a physical timeclock, preferring instead to rely on the individual responsibility of each faculty member to perform their duties (and then some) relative to a general online schedule filed with human resources. While faculty at international institutions may take for granted the freedom to carry out their academic duties around campus with flexible schedules to account for the shifting priorities and needs within a day, a relatively small minority of faculty in Mexico enjoy this kind of trust (many going as far as having biometric timeclocks). As the university focuses on providing even more active links to our local, regional, and national, and international partners – this flexibility becomes a major competitive advantage. We have had project meetings where visiting scholars had to get multiple papers signed and stamped by upper-level administrators at UPAEP to prove to their home institutions that they really were working with us off-campus, because their word was not enough when working on multi-million-peso projects. UPAEP’s impressive academic track record speaks for itself with respect to this faculty-university trust and is a point of workplace pride that cannot be taken lightly.

·      This success has been bolstered by the integration of the Google Apps for Business digital ecosystem that allows all team members to share calendars, collaborate on shared project folders, and have secure access to email and communication wherever they may go. As a counterexample, I have seen examples of other institutions with email systems so cumbersome and oppressive that the faculty either had to get second phones or tablets just to manage their institutional mail, or surrender their personal devices to invasive institutional control.

·      The examples cited here are merely intended to be the highlights of projects or results of which I have had personal knowledge, awareness, or interaction. They are by no means a comprehensive list, but rather a highlight. Considering the miniscule sample N=1 of observers, I am confident that the true breadth of successes in this field at UPAEP is many times greater.

UPAEP has made great strides in building the foundations for a healthy digital trust ecosystem. However, the speed of the digital transformation around us does not give us the luxury of resting upon these laurels. We must continue to learn, invest, evolve, and improve our digital ecosystem. Our self-study [3] must continuously assess where we are and where we need to be on this important point. We must recognize that the “payout” for these investments, as with much investment in infrastructure and maintenance, may be hard to gauge. Often, the value is recognized only after failure in either system or infrastructure. A humorous but quite apropos example by Randall Munroe of XKCD highlights the direction that poorly thought-out strategies can take our digital security rules and systems, which can lead to the breaking of trust: https://xkcd.com/936/

As technology evolves, we will see more solutions that allow innovative options to these human limitations. However, we must be at the forefront of these innovations with the will, personnel, and institutional agility to ride at the leading edge of this wave towards the growth and presence we can achieve.

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Dr. Juan Manuel López Oglesby, Director, Graduate Biomedical Engineering Sciences UPAEP 

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