Today’s New York Times has an
article purporting to recount
what patterns a few computer science professors have discovered in
1.5-million internal Enron email messages, drawn from the 1999-2001
period. "Purporting" because the article is infuriatingly short
on detail or analysis, although it does have this fun graphic:
Now, the uses to which such analysis could be put are
staggering: EDD is as obvious as the nose on one’s face, but
within a law firm I think a far more intriguing possibility would be
to analyze internal and to/from client emails to see if they can shed
any light on Knowledge Management. Consider:
"Companies have organizational charts, but they reveal little
about how things really work, Dr. Carley said. Companies actually operate
through informal networks, which can be revealed by analyzing “who
spends time talking to whom, who are the power brokers, who are the
hidden individuals who have to know what’s going on,” she said."
Dr. Carley certainly sounds as though she should know a thing or two
about organizational dynamics. Her descriptive bio at the Carnegie-Mellon
site says: "Professor
Carley’s research centers around areas of social, organizational, knowledge
and information networks, organizational design, change, adaptivity
and performance, computational organization theory, crisis management,
social theory, impacts on information diffusion of changes in social
policy and changes in communication technology, and mapping experts’
and executives’ knowledge networks using textual analysis techniques."
So what’s the background to this story? In 2003, the Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission, which had authority over investigating
the price and supply gyrations in the California energy market
in 2001, posted the Enron email database online—I
found it here: Check
it out. As one of the few, and perhaps the largest, publicly-available
email databases, it’s obviously a ripe target for analysis. As
it turns out, one surprising aspect of these forensics is something
that did not appear—guardedness. As
one professor put it: "It wasn’t a case of keeping a
low profile. They
didn’t worry about the story they were telling."
Mens rea, anyone? If I were Ken Lay’s
lawyer, I would have the good professor testifying for me tomorrow
morning.
But as I say, the article’s maddening for all that it
leaves out: You could as well assume the professors did their
analysis through conjuring entrails. I’ve emailed Dr. Carley
at Carnegie Mellon to see if I can learn more and report
back to you. (Email
the reporter? Please.)
