Re: Email patterns can predict impending doom

[ultramegaman <seclists () ultramegaman com>]

Just because admins have access to the data doesn't mean they are the only
ones that can consume it.

Most organizations do analytics on their data. We use numerous sources of
logs to find customers that Marketing wants to target (or "retarget") to
sell more stuff to. We use IT Search tools like Splunk to process data from
Firewalls/IDS/WAFs to spot anomalous traffic in our network.

Why not do similar processing on all email transactions? The article says
"Human resources folk would probably find this extremely useful". Give them
some metrics on "overall stress within the org.", or pick out particularly
stressed-out individuals that need to take some personal days. I'm sure that
are already variants of this application that can be used to find treason or
dissent within a group.


On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 1:57 AM, silky <michaelslists () gmail com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 5:36 PM, Juha-Matti
> Laurio<juha-matti.laurio () netti fi> wrote:
> > What Enron case can teach to us...
> >
> > "Email logs can provide advance warning of an organisation reaching
> crisis point.
> > That's 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's 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."
> > --clip--
>
> So what though? Surely that's obvious.
>
> Who can use this information anyway? Nobody. Only the admins of the
> system, maybe, but for them it would already be more obvious given the
> stress of the managers directly around them.
>
> I mean it's not like email logs would be made public, even just raw
> numbers, so that people can make judgements about the state of a
> company. Why stop there anyway, why not track the text messages and
> phone calls between them? That would surely be more indictative;
> specially in these days when people may be slightly more conservative
> with the emails they send. And then to be even more boring but still
> web2.0, why not add in facebook messages and linkedin messages and
> twitter dms? why not note down the activity, in general, on linked in
> from the company. Surely you could expect it to go up senior people
> start to desperately search for other places to go.
>
> *shrug*
>
> Pretty boring, obvious, useless research IMHO.
>
> --
> noon silky
> http://lets.coozi.com.au/
>
> "A quote that makes me seem smart, humble, and rationalises my actions."
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