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A group of US researchers believe they can identify a company heading into trouble by analysing the pattern (not content) of email messages flowing throughout the organisation.

According to a report in the New Scientist, Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes at the Florida Institute of Technology have identified key events in the demise of energy giant Enron, which collapsed and went bankrupt in late 2001 after a massive accounting fraud took place.

In the resulting investigation, federal authorities obtained records of emails sent by around 150 senior staff during the company's final 18 months of trading. These email logs included approximately 517,000 emails sent to 15,000 staff members.

By analysing these email logs, the researchers think they provide an insight into how communication within an organisation changes during stressful times.

According to the New Scientist, Collingsworth and Menezes identified key events in Enron's demise, such as the resignation of Enron's CEO Jeffrey Skilling in August 2001. They also examined the number of emails that were sent, and the groups that exchanged the messages when these events were taking place. They apparently did not look at the emails' content.

Menezes is quoted as saying that he expected communication networks to change during moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month beforehand. They cited the number of active 'email cliques' (basically groups where members had direct email contact with every other member) "jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse."

They also discovered that messages were increasingly exchanged within these 'cliques', and not shared with other employees.

The researchers therefore believe (maybe optimistically) that they have identified the characteristic changes that occurs as stress builds within a company, namely that staff stop sharing information with others and only talk with those they feel comfortable with.

If further research backs up their position, then could changes in email patterns within a company be used as a type of early warning system in the future?

And how would it overcome privacy concerns?

It also beggars the question, who would actually run or monitor these pattern analysis systems? Would it be the authorities, or the HR or IT department within an organisation?

Personally, my money would be on the IT department, but again, what would happen if IT detected that things were heading south, like in Enron's case? Who would they report to, especially if the management themselves were involved? I suspect they would quickly update their CVs and get the hell out of Dodge.

Mind you, maybe an easier way to detect if things are heading for disaster is if the CFO suddenly places a bulk order for paper shredders...

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