What your emails say about you

Our electronic trails are powerfully revealing – for those who can decode them

How many emails did you send today? What time did you swipe in with your keycard? Did you IM your friends? Did you make changes to a shared document? When you went to lunch, did you bring your BlackBerry? If your boss walked in the door right now, could you say how productive you've been? You may not have a ready answer, but those digital breadcrumbs you've been leaving can answer for you.

Cataphora is a Silicon Valley company that tries to model what an "effective" employee looks like based upon her electronic trail. The company began in the e-discovery field, dealing with the massive corporate databases that are now routinely subpoenaed as trial evidence. Imagine you're a lawyer tasked with going through a few terabytes of email to see if there's anything damaging to your client. A keyword search isn't going to cut it; the linguists and programmers at Cataphora (and similar companies) specialize in sifting through electronic records to figure out what's useful and relevant.

Over the years, Cataphora has helped out in many cases where it's useful to know whether an employee is thriving within the company. This may indicate whether he will be a co-operative witness. Or take the example of a whistle-blower. While it's against the law to conduct a witch-hunt and fire the whistle-blower, it's very advantageous to know, before you get into court, who the whistle-blower may be (i.e., is it someone in a position to give a lot of information to the government?). When dealing with these kinds of issues, Cataphora started with the basic tradecraft assumption that a happy employee is unlikely to cause problems.

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Source: thestar.com
By: Michael Agger