Towards an Assessment Method for Social Transparency in Enterprise Information Systems

Abstract

Social transparency through an enterprise information system refers to the use of digital media by individuals and groups to communicate their own information voluntarily to others within their work environment. It is typically meant to support positive work ethics such as collaboration, trust, efficiency and informed decision-making. Unmanaged social transparency may lead to negative consequences such as information overload, motivating unwanted grouping amongst colleagues and leading to an increased pressure to perform in a certain manner. There is a lack of systematic methods to evaluate and assess the quality of social transparency in general and its shortcomings and risks in particular. Our research aims to provide engineering methods for social transparency platforms as a domain-specific social computing service that can shepherd interactions and analyse content and detect and correct anomalies. As a first step, we conducted a multistage qualitative study, including focus groups and in-depth interviews to explore and conceptualise online social transparency and the risks stemming from its unmanaged implementation. We provide a reference model as a starting point for methods to assess social transparency risks. Our conceptualisation and reference model are based on a goal-oriented requirement engineering (GORE) mindset mainly because transparency and its effects are closely related to intentions, tasks, resources, strategies, and inter-dependencies between organisational actors; all of which are common constructs in GORE.