ON June 2016 | Page 14

Trust is a missing component in most business environments today. And without trust, companies face a multitude of challenges when it comes to spearheading necessary change, uniting employees around a common vision, fostering a positive culture and promoting an environment of continuous improvement and growth. “As a senior IT leader within my organization, fostering trust among my team, peers, and colleagues is critically important,” says Vito DeLuca, Director of Information Technology for Education Development Center (EDC), a global nonprofit organization. “It’s only when trust is achieved that true organizational transformation can be reached.” There are many models out there about how to build trust, but most underscore the importance of open communication when it comes to fostering trust. In other words, communication opens up the doors to trust. What Does Trust Look Like? We’ve all felt and seen trust—signs that our business, relationships and pursuits are moving in the right direction. The team at EDC knew the importance of trust when it was faced with making an important technology decision. EDC had in place a complex, multi-vendor storage and compute environment and these once state-of-the-art products were nearing the end of their lifecycle and in need of replacement. Working in his office one day, DeLuca was interrupted by his head of systems and infrastructure who mentioned a new technology that a professional contact wanted to introduce to EDC. The new technology was a hyperconverged infrastructure device from