Who Thinks Who Knows Who? Socio-cognitive Analysis of Email Networks

Interpersonal interaction plays an important role in organizational dynamics, and understanding these interaction networks is a key issue for any organization, since these can be tapped to facilitate various organizational processes. However, the approaches of collecting data about them using surveys/interviews are fraught with problems of scalability, logistics and reporting biases, especially since such surveys may be perceived to be intrusive. Widespread use of computer networks for organizational communication provides a unique opportunity to overcome these difficulties and automatically map the organizational networks with a high degree of detail and accuracy. This paper describes an effective and scalable approach for modeling organizational networks by tapping into an organization’s email communication. The approach models communication between actors as nonstationary Bernoulli trials and Bayesian inference is used for estimating model parameters over time. This approach is u...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICDM
• Authors: Nishith Pathak, Sandeep Mane, Jaideep Srivastava
• Keywords: Data Mining, Enron Email Data, ICDM 2006, Organizational Communication, Organizational Networks