A Variety of Trust Offerings

TRUST IN AND AMONG ORGANIZATIONS

At the tail end of Sri's career with Intel, he served as the Chief Architect for Knowledge Management. This included heavily technology driven KM such as portals and knowledge bases along with community development in the form of a multitude of Communities of Practice. In developing over 35 communities one thing stood out. First these were the "easy ones" - communities of specialists who shared interest and sharing knowledge enhanced their own. Second, when he attempted to form cross-disciplinary communities for knowledge sharing - the issue was hardly that of "hoarding knowledge" made popular in various KM conferences - it was the opposite - marketing would not trust engineering, engineering would not trust technical support and so forth. So Trust within and among organizations became a topic of great interest. Upon leaving Intel, Sri got busy studying the role of trust in organizations.

The first summer he spent in Menlo Park, he developed a friendship with Prof Syed Shariq who agreed to form TrustNet whose primary activity at that time was a weekly gathering of interested individuals to discuss and enhance each other's knowledge of trust. An invited lecture at NASA the next year, where Sri spoke about "trust in sociotechnical systems" confirmed that interest was great in the topic. Back in Phoenix, Sri set out to interview more than half dozen leaders of corporations and began synthesizing a novel framework for trust assessment and re-alignment of the organization. Out of this came a book Leadership, Strategy and Trust and a < a href=trustworkshop.htm>corporate workshop on Trust in and among organizations.

An introduction to Dr. Scott Brave, who then was a doctoral student at Stanford with Prof Cliff Nass, blossomed into a collaboration that culminated in a multiplayer game called Who Do You Trust?. We now have conducted this game in several settings. The vision for this game is now to make it a "Million Player Online Trust Game" and we are working to make it an Internet game. If you have talent or interest in assisting in developing this game, please contact us.