KM tool highlights Enron e-mails

By Graeme Burton

Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling should, by now, have packed his toothbrush in readiness for his 24-year incarceration following his conviction for fraud at the end of October, his inevitable appeal notwithstanding.

But web users can decide for themselves the guilt of Skilling – and chairman Kenneth Lay, who died of a heart attack before sentence was passed – after all the e-mails relating to the case were put online as part of a showcase for a recently released discovery tool.

The Enron Explorer can be used in an ordinary web browser and enables users to not only rifle through the overflowing in-boxes of all the top executives at the disgraced company, but to search using any search term and see the relationships between the top executives, too, in a social-network-analysis-style graphic.

The tools is based on Sonar, a software package developed by Charles Armstrong and Craig McMillan, founders of software start-up Trampoline Systems. It is a new-style knowledge management tool, they say, that can be plugged into a variety of collaborative systems – e-mail, file sharing, contact management, extranet and search – to provide instant visibility and insight into organisational relationships.

It thereby also highlights sources of expertise, helping to deliver knowledge where it's needed most. “With Sonar we went right back to the social processes involved in identifying, organising and disseminating knowledge. Then we found ways to mirror these processes electronically to solve some of the most pressing

knowledge management issues. The Enron Explorer provides a fascinating example of how Sonar makes sense of complex information by analysing social networks and thematic links,” said Armstrong.

Charles Armstrong is profiled in this month’s Inside Knowledge, in The Knowledge.