By Oscar Berg, Future Office Evangelist
September 01, 2010 - 6:08 AM
Transparency is about making our decisions and actions visible to others. It is about sharing information. It is about knowing who provided a certain piece of information. It is about accountability and recognition. It is about credibility. It is about increasing our trust in the information that is shared, and the people who shared it. It is about bringing people and their ideas together. It is about finding out what we don't know we don’t know.
Among many things, increased transparency fosters efficiency as employees can get access to information they might need to make (the right) decisions. It fosters innovation as ideas can be shared and find their ways to the people who can bring them to the market.
Increased transparency is one of the great benefits of introducing social software to serve an enterprise. Even though social software is designed for transparency, it does not create transparency by itself. Transparency comes when people start to use social software to share information. By default, everybody can access the information that shared since openness is the default in social software. Restricting access to it requires an active decision and action from someone. So, transparency is what you get by default from social software.
There are always risks that need to be managed when increasing transparency, relating to such things as privacy and security. Some people will also experience the feeling of information overload (until they have created and/or tuned their filters). The important message is that these risks can be managed, and they will be managed. The potential value that might come from increased transparency is simply greater than the potential costs. The greatest risks most organizations face are related to lack of transparency; bad decision-making, rework and waste, inability to innovate, low productivity, disengaged employees, failure to understand and satisfy the needs and expectations of customers. These are things that might put them out of business.
Everything won’t become transparent, but everything that should be transparent should be. We must all become better at judging which information could be shared and which should not. Systems that restrict or even prevents us from sharing make us act without thinking. Many people have become used to these rigid systems and when they sometimes use more freeform tools, they might use the freeform tools to share information without thinking – because they’re used to not thinking. With email, that happens every day already. Even though there are more complex security and privacy concerns related to email than to most social software, hardly anyone ever questions the value of email today.
I think we are deceiving ourselves if we think that having unique access to certain pieces of information is what will create competitive advantages. Today, and even more so tomorrow, real comparative advantage is created by talented people who are able to find relevant information and turn it into actionable knowledge and create value together. The challenge is to find, attract and retain these people and create an environment where this talent can be used to its full extent. Transparency is mandatory in such an environment.
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