Social Transparency in Enterprise Information Systems: Peculiarities and Assessment Factors

Abstract

Social transparency within an organisation refers to the intentional sharing by individuals of information relating to themselves and their group to others in the workplace. This includes announcing personal interests, activity status, priorities and personal achievements. Such transparency is typically intended to increase relatedness, motivation and trust amongst colleagues. Social networking features are being embedded within organisational information systems, allowing an online version of social transparency. An ad-hoc implementation of such transparency can pose issues such as information overload, motivating unwanted grouping amongst colleagues and increasing pressure to perform in a certain manner. This results in organisational problems such as reduced productivity, unproductive competition and high turnover rates. Our ultimate aim is to address these issues by proposing an assessment method for online social transparency to detect and minimise its negative impact on employees and organisations. In this paper, we report on empirical study results and present (1) a set of peculiarities of implementing online transparency in enterprise information systems and (2) a set of essential factors that relate to the assessment process.

Online social transparency in enterprise information systems: a risk assessment method

“…It is expected to help them to identify potential risks that occur because of social transparency through online platforms. To devise this method, several qualitative studies were conducted, including focus groups, interviews, and observational study to capture the underlying concepts and artefacts [17][18][19]. The assessment method includes two phases: the preparation phase and the action phase, presented in Table 6.…”

“…In the list below, we represent these four key aspects. In [17,19], the risks that are associated with these factors and the importance of including them in the assessment method will be discussed in detail in Sect. 4.2.…”

“…The work in [17][18][19] showed limitations in the literature regarding assessing the risks of online social transparency:…”

“…Thus, in this paper, our aim is to develop a new assessment method to identify and assess the risks and risk factors of online social transparency in enterprise information systems and support enterprise management and system analysts to detect and prioritise risks that stem from unguided conduct of online social transparency. We build our risk assessment method benefiting from the work in [17][18][19] that applied a multistage qualitative study and provided experimental evidence that ad-hoc online social transparency can have unfavourable effects on employees and organisations and, also, provided categories of risks and risk factors. To achieve the aim of our research, we have:…”

Online Social Transparency in Enterprise Information Systems: Risks and Risk Factors

“…In this paper, we build on our previous work in [3,14] and conduct a multi-stage qualitative study (described in Section 2) to provide empirical evidence that online social transparency can lead to a negative impact on employees as well as organisations if implemented and conducted in an unmanaged style (Section 3). We provide common risks and associate them with certain classifications of online social transparency (Section 4).…”