How smart IT workers know when their company's doomed

Some intellectuals want to study humanity. Others just want to study humanity's e-mails.

Which can, sometimes, be more fascinating than the people who wrote them.

A couple of researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology seem to be in the e-mail study camp. Or perhaps there was simply nothing better to think about in Melbourne, Fla., recently.

In any case, they took it upon themselves to examine the e-mails sent at Enron, specifically, how the e-mailing patterns changed as Enron was revealed to be channeling the spirit of Bernie Madoff, rather than Bernie Mac or Bernie Kosar.

The researchers, Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes, concluded, according to a report in New Scientist, that e-mailing patterns just might be a rather accurate barometer of your company's innards.

I wonder who else was in their e-mail group.

(Credit: CC Alex-S/Flickr)

Collingsworth and Menezes thought it might be fun to see whether the pattern of e-mails written at the time of the resignation of Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling in 2001 might carve out a dainty paisley or the Rorschach inkblot of a disturbed dipsomaniac.

They simply looked at who sent e-mails to whom and how many were sent.

What they discovered was that a month before Skilling fell on his letter-opener, the number of active e-mail cliques--the researchers defined them as e-mail groups in which every member had direct e-mail contact with each other--rose from 100 to 800.

Here's the other characteristic that seemed to foreshadow the spilling of corporate o-positive: more messages were sent within these groups to the exclusion of anyone else in the company.

There is one small downside to this kind of research: most organizations won't let you look at e-mail logs because of concerns about privacy, which is totally understandable.

However, I have a fanciful notion, perhaps slightly fueled by the high level of discourse in the tech world, that techies can, in the privacy of their own PC world, discover everything that is electronically occurring in their domain.

So I wonder whether, in the depths of corporate IT departments across the world, there are clever people studying the finely-weaved patterns of their company's e-mail behavior.

Not out of some misplaced, droopy-headed snoopiness. But because, well, there's a recession out there and they need to know whether their employers will still be their employers when the sun rises.

[fazalmajid]

SAP actually makes a program called Social Network Analyzer that does precisely this kind of data mining on email logs:
http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2009/05/19/sap-social-network-analyzer-thoughts-on-company-integration/

[WalterAnonymous]

Where I have worked, and it is not an anomaly, people who take the trouble to discern these patterns, particularly because doing so is always unauthorized and easily detected by auditors, are routinely terminated. If you can't figure out that your company is tanking while you are working there, you have much larger problems than employment security. In fact, if you are taking the trouble to discern this, you should be terminated for cause immediately, and would probably benefit from some intensive therapy.

[Random_Walk]

Agreed, 100%.

There are roughly three human beings in my company (myself among them, because I built it) with the skills and access to literally read everybody's emails as they pass through the IT system. Thing is, I don't need that to tell me whether my employer is having troubles or having good times.

All it takes (for the curious) is to watch your own workload, set a few choice Google Alerts for your industry, careful attention to the rumor mill, and a good eye on sales... none of this requires snooping around in the SMTP feeds.

That first part will tell you how well you yourself are doing (if you're building and expanding, great! If you find yourself sitting around a lot or consolidating things too much, polish your resume and save like crazy). The second and third give you a rough idea as to how others perceive your employer (and require a BS filter, naturally). The last one is vital, and isn't too hard to figure out.

A good employer (e.g. mine) will go out of their way to communicate how their sales, production, etc are doing. I can read my employer's figures any time I want... not in email, but on the corp. intranet site, just like anybody else can. Any employer who doesn't communicate openly and honestly to their own employees is one you probably don't want to work for in the long run anyway.

[Voice_Of_Logic]

I think the point to be taken here is to become a "researcher". I love these so-called "research" studies that alert us to new trends like " A 2 million dollar study has shown that driving and texting is dangerous...." uh, no sh*t. "Or, a 1 million dollar research study shows that fat people die sooner than skinnny people" or the best is when another "competitor" team posts the "People who are chubby at 40 live 7 years longer than those who are thinner..."

Its all scams to me. I'd like to become a "researcher" and get my hands on a piece of this unending amount of money that is available to these people who NEVER tell us anything, really. What a scam.

[Wookiee-1138]

Sounds like Asimovian Psychohistory.

[saintseminole]

I'm certainly beginning to wonder what's wrong with the economy, if we have enough money to be studying things that are completely obvious.

[jaguar717]

What's wrong is that an ever-increasing portion of the "economy" has become devoted to non-productive endeavors rather than adding value to the world. You have "career students" pursuing degree after degree in theoretical mush, but never actually leaving the campus to take that crucial step: making it into something real!

Instead you have armies of "researchers" more concerned with securing government grants, lobbyists demanding funding for things that people would never fund Voluntarily, politicians eager to take more of our earnings to throw money at a million impending catastrophes that never seem to happen, oh and an extra layer of interference in our lives to go with it!

Nobody gets a million dollar study for saying something is NOT a crisis, so the incentive system becomes "toe the line or no tenure/funding for you". The end result is universal groupthink and laughable paradoxes like "scientific consensus" (nevermind that the two are opposites and every breakthrough in history has been a lone trailblazer challenging the status quo and being ridiculed until proven right).

Hype and chains baby! If you don't like it, shut up and pay your taxes. You must be one of those extremists with a Ron Paul bumper sticker...the Ministry of Hate Speech will be there for you shortly.

[cvaldes1831]

Actually you can tell when a company is doomed when the best and brightest employees leave. They're the first since they have the best opportunities elsewhere. They are usually smart enough to do this before the grumbling starts in earnest.

Remember that they will be using their personal e-mail accounts/mobile numbers to communicate with people on the outside about career opportunities. The corporate IT department would never be able to pick this up.

[Renegade Knight]

True enough. However the problem has to exist for the best and brightest to pick it up on their radar. Before it's a blp the signs in this articile would appear.

[cvaldes1831]

Actually the best and brightest are probably more astute than their colleagues, and may also have access to key information that many others in the company don't have (i.e., they're chief scientists, lead engineers, whatever). They're the ones who understand that certain actions now might have repercussions months or years down the line.

By the time the entire company knows about the problems and excessive e-mail activity can be recognized in server logs, the best employees are long gone.