IT is such an integral part of almost all our daily (routine) activities, that we must change our lifestyle without technology. For example, each time I look up the fastest route on Google Maps or Waze, there is a little voice in my head that tells me I shouldn’t listen to my smartphone, but stick to my own plan. The development of autonomous cars or robotics surgery is another example of how we – as humans – are confronted with ‘Trust in IT’. Do we trust sufficiently the technology in our autonomous cars to let it drive us from A to B? And do we have faith in the algorithms of a robot that performs surgery on us, rather than a human surgeon? In the future we will face more and more of these challenges, whereby our lives are put in the hands of technology-driven solutions.
Organizations are also facing these challenges of trust in their daily businesses. More organizations make management decisions based on complex data-driven models and queries, but are these trustworthy? Does the output of such queries match with what the programmer thinks it tells him/her, and moreover, does it reflect the current situation or predict the near future sufficiently reliable? Another challenge of trust for organizations is the outsourcing of their IT to service providers. How do organizations know, for example, that their data is stored safely? Or, on what grounds can they trust their supplier?
We can easily conclude that ‘Trust in IT’ is everywhere, and has a major impact on our society, positive as well as negative. In our daily personal lives, and in our business lives, we face the above-mentioned challenges with technology. ‘Trust in IT’ can better be based on fact-based insights than due to mere ignorance. But, what is trust exactly? Trust is a concept that establishes assured reliance or confidence. It can be emotional and logical, and therefore a feeling or something predictable. This broad interpretation makes it hard to define trust, and makes it even harder to provide a solid definition of ‘Trust in IT’.
Therefore, this Compact edition offers a broad variety of articles. From Trusted Analytics to Algorithm Assurance, from Software Asset Management to Quality Assurance; this edition provides you with insights into ‘Trust in IT’ from different perspectives. We thank the contributing authors and sincerely hope you will enjoy this edition of Compact. If you would like to further explore one of the perspectives of ‘Trust in IT’, we invite you to contact one of the Compact editors or any of the contributing authors.