Social Transparency in Enterprise Information Systems: Peculiarities and Assessment Factors

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.