Activity 6: Engage with stakeholders to define next steps
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Learn how to engage with stakeholders and members of your ecosystem to identify gaps or areas of misalignment that need to be addressed through further work
Now that you have identified and documented the steps you are taking to be a trustworthy steward of data within this relationship with this specific stakeholder, you can use that documentation to engage with that stakeholder to assess the degree to which they are satisfied with the steps you are taking and whether they are able to trust you as a result.
Send tidied up, non-sensitive versions of the documentation you have produced working through this guidebook (for example, the internal trustworthiness mapping worksheet from Activity 2, the Data Ecosystem Map from Activity 4 and/or the trustworthiness mapping worksheet from Activity 5) to this stakeholder to gather their feedback on whether the steps you have outlined in that documentation align with their needs and expectations:
Are they able to trust you in each area of the elements of trustworthy data stewardship and to what degree?
Are the steps that you are taking to be trustworthy in each of the elements of trustworthy data stewardship meeting their expectations?
Do they feel better able to trust you having seen evidence of the steps you are taking to be trustworthy?
If you completed a trustworthiness mapping worksheet for your organisation as a whole as part of Activity 2, you could send a version of that worksheet instead of or in addition to the trustworthiness mapping worksheet specific to this relationship from Activity 5.
By sending along a short survey for them to fill in or a short series of questions to respond to, you will lessen the amount of time you are asking for and increase the likely response rate.
You might also ask your partners or stakeholders to work through the ranking exercise (Activity 4) with you collaboratively. This is particularly useful for two or more organisations engaged in a relationship or shared venture looking to identify areas of misalignment that can lead to a loss of trust or potential controversy.
By prioritising the elements individually and then comparing them, organisations can get a better understanding of which facets of trustworthy data stewardship are important to each party. For some organisations, security and privacy will be most important; for others, ethics and transparency will be paramount. Knowing how different partners or members of an ecosystem define trustworthiness can help organisations take steps to ensure they are meeting the needs and expectations of partners and stakeholders. If the steps you are taking to be trustworthy are not helping others place their trust in you, it may be time to identify different steps.
How did your ranking of the important elements of trustworthiness within this relationship compare with that of your stakeholder?
Fill in Column E of your trustworthiness mapping worksheet (found in Activity 5) by writing down any areas in need of improvement or further work and documenting agreed next steps. Here, it is useful to review your trustworthiness mapping worksheet and reflect on the response from engaging with your stakeholder. For instance, if governance and strategic oversight has been an area of concern, putting in place processes and procedures to ensure that any data your organisation collects or uses is managed consistently and in line with agreed priorities and commitments might be useful. These initial steps can be enforced further by drafting an agreement to regularly take steps to review your practices and workflows and update and improve them when necessary. Questions that you might want to ask yourself include:
Did engaging with your stakeholder help spotlight any areas where you feel you should seek to raise your level of trustworthiness within this or other relationships? What, specifically, will you do to build trust and trustworthiness in that area? Over what timeframe?
Does your overall organisational ranking of the elements of trustworthy data stewardship (Activity 1) align with your actual practices within this relationship?
Do your practices within this relationship align with the hierarchy of trustworthy data stewardship (Activity 3)?
