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.)
May 22, 2005 2:43 PM
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