Keeping Promises

Backing up your promises of reliability with proof is becoming a New Economy critical success factor

By Kristin Valente

In the old economy, prevailing wisdom ruled that "time is money." In the connected economy, "trust is money." In a world where your competitors are becoming business partners, your company sources mission-critical business functions to third-party providers, and your customers, regulators, the media, and investors stand ready to reprimand your company if it doesn't do what it says, trust and confidence are imperative to garnering participation and achieving business success.

In today's economy, even companies with recognized brands are struggling to establish trust and confidence as their business models change. These business models assume immediate and active customer participation, leaving scant time for brands or reputations to mature or stakeholder confidence to increase. To move at warp speed, your business - be it established or startup - must be able to assure one and all that it can deliver what, and when, it promises. Although failing to do so can trigger the demise of a business, more often this process is just staggeringly expensive.

Old economy paradigms would have companies developing marketing messages that repeatedly told their stakeholders what they are doing. But just saying what they are doing isn't enough. Even the most technology- and business-savvy stakeholders are asking for more. They want proof, not just promises. Their primary concern: Are your company's promises of reliable systems trustworthy enough to hand over mission-critical data, processes, or transactions? Quickly and adequately addressing this concern is a New Economy "critical success factor."

But what is the best way for your business to effectively communicate the reliability of its systems: To your diverse stakeholders? To your customers and potential customers who may not have firsthand experience with your people, processes, or technology? To your business or alliance partners who must support service agreements? To your employees and other internal stakeholders whose confidence in the integrity of your company's business model is essential to their wholehearted participation?

Filling the Void

Enter the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accounts (CICA). Recognizing that the marketplace could greatly benefit from the introduction of a uniform code of assurance standards that can be equally and evenly applied to any business or business function, regardless of industry sector, the two professional organizations joined forces in 2000 to create SysTrust, a service designed to provide independent assurance on system reliability.

The move puts into the hands of independent reviewers - the groups' own certified public accountant members - a set of clearly defined standards and measures that they can uniformly apply to any discrete business system, in much the same way that CPAs evaluate financial analysis and reporting practices. For businesses seeking to prove their trustworthiness, SysTrust provides a generally accepted set of standards as a basis for that claim. With an independent examination of your people, processes, and technology by an independent accountant, your company earns a report to back up its claims of reliability.

Setting the Standards

SysTrust is founded on the AICPA's and CICA's shared definition of a reliable system: "One that is capable of operating without material error, fault, or failure during a specified period in a specified environment." To that end, SysTrust encompasses four principles for evaluating system reliability: