Trust is paramount to a digital world: Victor Dominello

As the public sector becomes more digital, trust with customers is beyond paramount according to Victor Dominello, NSW minister for digital and customer service.

At the Digital.NSW showcase, Dominello, spoke to attendees on the importance of trust and continuing to build a digital legacy.

He said, “In a digital world, trust is beyond paramount, it is so fragile and precious. Just ask some of the corporates who have failed in digital trust.

“In a digital world, if we cannot tell the who, the what and the why; then we do not have any trust. You will have low adoption and we will have major problems, this is a function of democracy. It goes to the core tenets of our democracy; we've got to get this right.”

Dominello said as more NSW services are becoming digitised like birth certificates and educational history, they cannot get it wrong.

“It is so important; we are moving from the proverbial digital swamp to the digital land. It really is an epoch moment for us and you will be a part of it,” he explained to the public sector audience.

In the future, Dominello said that the NSW government and its agencies will have trusted environments.

“There are a whole lot of agencies here that don't have multifactor authentication (MFA). There are a whole lot of agencies here that are not where they should be in terms of their digital maturity.

“If you then use a Digital ID as a front door, as you know it's trusted, then your systems are far more secure. You're not letting hostile players into your network, that’s where we have to be. You can't allow vulnerabilities to be exposed, you can only let real; people in, you don't want hostile players to go into your systems.”

He said putting the customer first requires current engineering to take place, "If we can land this and we put the power of data and control into the hands of the individual, rather than us moving the wires behind the scenes, between ourselves, we will be shifting gravity.

"We had to hard reset with money, we had to hard reset with oversight, this means that once you service your customers individually as agencies, you will naturally gravitate towards the customer and that is the epoch moment."