Managing Transparency Guided by a Maturity Model

Transparency is a concept that is widely shared, but with a wide spectrum of distinct interpretations. We have been working on nailing down the transparency concept within the organizational context. As such, we have created a conceptual model of transparency, focusing on its relationships with other qualities (accessibility, usability, understandability, informativeness and auditability). Departing from this conceptualization of transparency we are building a normative guide to measure the level of transparency of an organization. Similar to the Nolan stage model for Information Systems adoption, we are proposing maturity stages to gauge the advancements of the organizations towards transparency maturity. Within the scope of Simon ́s bounded rationality our conceptual model has ways to judge how far or close an organization may be with respect to certain expected transparency practices. Our work aims to establish a way of attributing, in a transparent way, stars to organizations, according to how they “satisfice” our conceptual model. As such a five star system, could better inform the organization itself, as well as the market, of how mature they are with respect to transparency. Each level (opaque, disclosed, comprehended, reliable, participative) has to “satisfice” some criteria in our conceptual model, which are translated to real practices being performed within an organization. Our work is defining such practices, and how they can be observed by the organization, that is; which work products are necessary for sustaining the practices or which are produced by the practices. We are also drawing from the work done by the ISO organization and by the CMU SEI (Software Engineering Institute) on their models to evaluate software quality. In particular, the SEI model, CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) is also organized in a five level scale. The goal of our paper is to present the results so far and discuss this line of normative policies towards increasing the level of transparency in organizations.