EMAIL logs can provide advance warning of an organisation reaching crisis point. That鈥檚 the tantalising suggestion to emerge from the pattern of messages exchanged by Enron employees.
After US energy giant Enron collapsed in December 2001, federal investigators obtained records of emails sent by around 150 senior staff during the company鈥檚 final 18 months. The logs, which record 517,000 emails sent to around 15,000 employees, provide a rare insight into how communication within an organisation changes during stressful times.
Ben Collingsworth and at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne identified key events in Enron鈥檚 demise, such as the August 2001 resignation of CEO Jeffrey Skilling. They then examined the number of emails sent, and the groups that exchanged the messages, in the period around these events. They did not look at the emails鈥� content.
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Menezes says he expected communication networks to change during moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before. For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.
Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely. They presented their findings at the , held last month in Catania, Italy.
Gilbert Peterson at the Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton, Ohio, has also worked with the Enron emails. He says that if further research backs up Menezes鈥檚 idea, this shift in communication patterns could be used as an early warning sign of growing discontent within an organisation. 鈥淗uman resources folk would probably find this extremely useful,鈥� he says.
Confirming this link will be difficult, though, as privacy concerns mean that email logs are hardly ever made public. Menezes says his university will not allow him to analyse even an anonymised version of student email data.
Such restrictions are frustrating for researchers who study social networks, as they had hoped email logs might boost the field by providing unprecedented quantitative data on how people communicate.
A few other studies have been carried out, however. Duncan Watts of Yahoo Research in New York managed to obtain anonymised university email records 鈥� though he is not able to share them with others 鈥� and used them to show that instead of varying continuously, individuals鈥� emailing behaviour falls into . Meanwhile, Peterson used the Enron email log to develop software that scans for potential saboteurs working within an organisation.
