Analysis of e-mail Communication Using a Social Network Framework for Crisis Detection in an Organization

The e-mails exchanged, as an indicator of information exchange in an organization, is used to facilitate the emergence of structure within the organization. In this paper, we infer the formal hierarchy and also detect the informal networks in the context of organizational e-mail archives from a social network perspective. We explore the performance of the social network based classifier and the evolutions of informal networks over time to better understand the interplay between communication patterns and major events within an organization like Enron. Prediction accuracy of the social network classifier delineates the normal and crisis periods in an organization. We found that the study of informal networks along with the structural hierarchy can provide a clue to the health of the corporate.