Abstract
Enterprises integrate social networking within their information systems to enhance collegiality, situational awareness, coordination and collaboration amongst their members. Social networking features can be seen in traditional systems such as the online profile, calendar, dashboard, auto-reply and status. More specialised systems enable bespoke features to declare and share and retrieve current and past engagements, team memberships, allocated tasks and priorities. Such social transparency is typically voluntary and not strictly enshrined by organisational governance and norms. Despite its positive connotations, negative consequences such as information overload, social loafing and undesired pressure can be a result of it. We conducted a multistage qualitative study, including focus groups, interviews and observations, to conceptualise online social transparency and explore the risks that stem from its unmanaged implementation. Our research aims to provide the first step towards a systematic method for risk identification and mitigation around online social transparency.