E-mail reveals real leaders
“…Want to know how your organization really works – who speaks to whom, who holds the power? Then study the flow of internal e-mail, say scientists at global technology firm Hewlett-Packard. The researchers have developed a way to use e-mail exchanges to build a map of the structure of an organization. The map shows the teams in which people actually work, as opposed to those they are assigned to…”
Interesting, if frustratingly short, article. It reminds me of the sort of thing that tacit try and harness. Instant Messaging traffic analysis would also reveal interesting things. Challenge for organisations would be to respond to this effectively.
Three things struck me:
1) I’ve been reading PeopleWare (amazing book, worthy of adding to my increasingly large list of must post things) and it talks about ‘jelled’ teams and the individuals who always seem to be present when this happens. They basically act as unseen facilitators and are arguably crucial to a company. Perhaps this sort of traffic analysis would ‘reveal’ them to the organisation
2) This analysis would probably reveal the pointlessness (or at least give the impression of this) of certain people, a large proportion of whom I imagine would be middle managers – would this sort of analysis go down well in those circles. Ok, so I’m being cynical, but still…
3) And what about ‘cc’ traffic? How to handle that – I get cc’d on loads of things, but I don’t know whether I’d rate myself as important to some of the content – I suppose the algorithm must monitor both sender and recipients?