January 8, 2021
In December 2003, Frederick F. Reicheld published an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled ‘The One Number you need to Grow’ where he defined a simple way for all businesses using a Net Promoter Score (NPS) by asking the question: ´Would you recommend this company to a friend?’. Since then, NPS has become one of the most important metrics for business success in the 21st century. Anyone who has worked in a business that uses NPS will know how personal and professional fortunes are dependent on moving NPS upwards. The concept of a Net Trust Score (NTS) as a simple metric to provide equal insight to a boardroom or a call center across any ecosystem or industry, would be of great value for enhanced business decisions. NTS would provide an accurate metric for potential business engagement with its derivation comprising informative insights on technical capabilities, conformance with standards such as ISO27001, and qualitative measures for more human-centric questions such as ‘Do you trust this company?’.
In the not-too-distant future, Trust over IP‘s four-layered dual-stack model may well provide a vehicle for deriving an auto-generated NTS as a metric for digital trust. Sovrin’s Steward Council and Network Operations team have begun the investigative journey of providing data insights on Sovrin networks and nodes through NetOps metrics and real-time monitoring. The metrics are now available via a public dashboard to help business leaders, developers, and other network users answer the question ‘Can you trust this network?’.
The first group of chosen metrics for the public dashboard provide insightful data to answer basic questions on the human-trust decision.
As new networks are born into the SSI community, uniform data insight solutions would go some way to ensuring that human-friendly metrics are available to help answer important questions regarding digital trust. The adoption of standard metrics across all networks would provide the necessary framework (a kind of smart grid) to develop and manage an interoperable network-of-networks to the benefit of decision-makers looking to find the right home for their particular business and technical requirements. In the future, a single metric might be sufficient for that decision to be made.
To contribute to the work on SSI metrics, please join the Steward Council Health Workstream by contacting sc@sovrin.org or join the discussion in this linked document.
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