Securing the network and the information it transports requires an end-to-end design that encompasses all elements of the transaction process, not a collection of bolted-on technologies and techniques added periodically in response to isolated incidents.

A final lesson from Amex is that the CEO and board of directors must be proactive, fully engaged participants in the strategy to build and sustain trust. Amex's most senior executives view cardmember trust and the assurance of fully secure access to its network-delivered products and services as essential elements of their business model and stakeholder value proposition.

A trust-based business model is also a natural extension of enterprises' commitment to compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulations and the transparency that results. Moving to a trust-based model builds upon and expands the scope of SOX from its nearly singular focus on financial controls to an emphasis on the end-to-end operational value chain and all of the embedded processes and techniques designed to secure it. Importantly, thinking about trust in conjunction with SOX brings the CEO and the board into the equation-better ensuring their active engagement in setting critical strategies and policies.

Redefining Security and Privacy
Given pressure from stakeholders and the demands of regulators, the key to enterprise growth and the CIO's long-term job security is the CIO's ability to reshape his company's thinking about security and privacy. They need to create incentives for their executive management to create an operating model that earns stakeholders' trust.

If they are successful, security and privacy will change dramatically. With direct CEO- and board-driven leadership, security and privacy will become embedded in investments in new ways of doing business as opposed to being add-on insurance premiums. They will provide new pathways for engaging stakeholders and winning their loyalty.

The payoffs from moving to a trust-based business model are high-perhaps even a matter of survival for some enterprises and some industries such as financial services, media and health care. Thus, trust will emerge as the new basis for securing enterprise operations and protecting stakeholder information from all risks-strategic, operational and tactical. Companies will use trust to forge new alliances with stakeholders by guaranteeing secure and private interoperability. And in doing so, companies will define competitive success in a global online real-time marketplace.

John C. Reece, chairman and CEO of John C. Reece & Associates, is the former CIO of the Internal Revenue Service and of Time Warner. He can be reached at jc.reece@att.net.