Systems failure in corporate networks

Bruno Abrahao, Pilar Opazo, Nicholas Foti, Roberta Sinatra

Corporations are the quintessential complex systems. As such, disruptions in their structure, dynamics or processes may lead to malfunction which ultimately result in their failure. Accordingly, a systematic study aiming at characterizing the patterns of anomalies that reflect problematic operations could potentially help in the early detection and recovery from a tragic collapse. Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to obtain publicly available data that allow a comprehensive study of such entities. In this work, we study a dataset containing the e-mail folders of 150 employees of the former Enron Corporation, which was made publicly available as a result of the investigation of the "Enron scandal". We ask the following question: Is it possible to characterize signs of failure in corporations by analyzing its communication network? For this purpose, we study what networks features suggest problems in the underlying system by looking at the network evolution over time, in particular, during periods of crises.