Trust is the foundation of all relationships. That’s why several tech companies are expanding their C-suites with an executive whose sole job is ensuring their company maintains high levels of integrity with customers.
These chief trust officers, or CTrOs, are C-suite executives who build stakeholder trust in their company, including in how it handles and secures consumer data. According to an August Forrester report, the role has emerged over the past decade amongst tech and B2B software companies in response to various issues, including the potential to use technology and data for privacy abuse, bias, and harassment.
“Effectively, what the role does is offer assurance to the customers or potential customers of that organization that their data, their information, their technology, the infrastructure, the platform itself, can be trusted as those customers adopt it,” Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Jeff Pollard told IT Brew. “So, it goes a little bit beyond security.”
Trust guardians. In recent years, the CTrO role has found its way in the C-suites of various tech companies, including Salesforce and Autodesk. Pollard said it could be beneficial for a company to hire a CTrO because it escalates the responsibility of trust into an “executive priority.”
“You’re making them a member of the C-suite, which, in itself, shows an intentionality that I think is positive because it should influence the rest of what the company does,” Pollard said.
He added that designating a leader to be in charge of trust allows “more focus for the roles that roll up to the CTrO as opposed to everyone trying to do everything.”
However, adding a CTrO to your C-suite can come with baggage if not done properly, according to Pollard, who said the reporting structures associated with the role may unintentionally separate professionals from the technical side of their business.
“One of the very realistic concerns here, from a chief trust officer perspective, is when you’re broken out of the technology work and you span beyond that…just by definition, you do lose some insight as to what the tech org is doing,” he said.
A peake at the role. Chris Peake became CTrO at revenue AI platform company Gong in August. He told IT Brew his role combines IT and security at the SaaS provider.
“Day-to-day operationally, it’s addressing historical things on both the IT side of making sure that we’ve got systems up and running that support the business, [and] controlling endpoints and all those kinds of things,” Peake said, adding he is also responsible for making sure security is built into Gong’s products.
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