A risk assessment method for online social transparency in enterprise information systems.

Abstract

Enterprises integrate social networking tools within their information systems to enhance social networking, situational awareness, coordination and collaboration amongst their members. Social interaction can be empowered by traditional tools such as E-mail, or specialised social platforms, including Workplace by Facebook and Slack. More specialised systems enable bespoke features to declare, share and retrieve current and past engagements, team memberships, allocated tasks and priorities. Social transparency refers to the intentional sharing of information relating to intentions and reasoning of individual actions to others in the workplace. This includes announcing personal interests, activity status, priorities and personal achievements in order to explain individual intentions. Such transparency is typically intended to increase relatedness, motivation, coordination and trust amongst colleagues. However, an ad-hoc implementation of such transparency can pose issues such as information overload, social loafing, motivating unwanted grouping amongst colleagues and increasing pressure to perform in a particular manner. Although the current works on transparency and its effects illuminate the potential promise of managing social transparency in the enterprise, particularly in their online platforms, scholars still handle social transparency as an information quality issue and there is a lack of concrete knowledge about its potential risks and their factors. Moreover, there is a lack of systematic methods to evaluate and assess the quality of online social transparency in general and its shortcomings and risks in particular. In this research, we address the question of how to manage social transparency by identifying and assessing the risks of its ad-hoc practice. We provided a working definition of social transparency, and we assume that this transparency is an autonomous decision by organisation members to be open when conveying social information through online platforms. This research aims to provide a systematic method to identify and assess the risks of online social transparency within organisation members. To achieve the goal of this research, a qualitative approach has been adopted to explore the risks of online social transparency and how this transparency can be assessed. Implementing this approach resulted in several empirical studies involving employees, managers, systems analysts. Two focus groups resulted in exploring the concept of online social transparency and the assessment factors. An Interview study contributes to that aim by creating classifications of users’ perspective on risks and risk factors. An observational study conducted in two small multicultural companies to further explore the risks and risk factors from real organisational contexts. A novel assessment method for online social transparency was developed from these studies to assist system analysts and enterprise management in identifying and assessing the impact of online social transparency in their work environment.