There’s no better guilty pleasure than checking out a really nasty car wreck. And there’s been no greater corporate pileup in recent times than Enron. Now a data visualization startup has built a digital freeway past all that mayhem, and has invited the world in for a close look at the carnage.The result is the “Enron Explorer,” and it's quite a show. The web site offers a behind-the-scenes look inside the digital desk drawers of the personalities that executed Enron’s marching orders—trades, facility expansions, and keeping abreast of the legal and financial environments innate to interstate energy deals.
The result is the “Enron Explorer,” and it's quite a show. The web site offers a behind-the-scenes look inside the digital desk drawers of the personalities that executed Enron’s marching orders—trades, facility expansions, and keeping abreast of the legal and financial environments innate to interstate energy deals.
The Enron Explorer was created in an effort by London-based dataion visualization startup Trampoline Systems to demonstrate its approach to making it easy to find connections in vast troves of information. Trampoline needed a big database to work with. Fortunately, there was just such a database that fit the bill, namely the Enron email database, which was made public in 2003, when the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission placed 200,000 of Enron's internal emails from 1999-2002 into the public domain as part of its ongoing investigations.
Interoffice memoranda also documented the kind of humor that appealed to some Enron personnel, and in a few instances, a number of inter-office employee relationships and infidelities. It was also quite popular among Web users: Trampoline tracked thousands of users visiting its “Enron Explorer.”Similarly, most searches on former Enron employees now return Trampoline’s site as a top result.
As the firm notes on its blog: “Google Analytics confirms that we've had visitors from 71 different countries, interestingly enough including two from the Cayman Islands and one from an anonymising [sic] proxy – Kenny Boy, that's not you is it?”
Sticky AppFor Charles Armstrong, Trampoline’s CEO, what started as a technology showcase also became a staff obsession. “It gave the development team what they needed, but soon enough we all started finding ourselves digging around in the archive and swapping notes on particularly eye-popping mails we found. Also we were getting pestered by our friends who were dying to get their hands on it. In the end we decided to put the whole thing on a website where anyone could access so people would stop pestering us,” he said.
What particularly struck them about the result was the brazen quality of some of the energy trader emails.
“It was certainly surprising to see people actually talking about shredding and destroying evidence in the email. Didn't it occur to them that might be a bad idea?” he said. “Also there is a certain employee who appears to be dating three other employees at the same time, one of whom is already in a relationship with someone else. Life in Enron was evidently complicated.”
And how: Trampoline’s application lets users see the connection between people, themes of their emails, and the underlying email exchanges. Mr. Armstrong noted that it allows users to see Enron employee’s extended networks.
The Rise and FallIt also captured the tone of what happened when Enron ran afoul of the legal system—including directions to employees to retain documents, notices of subpoenas being hand delivered, how the company’s NYSE delisting wouldn’t affect its business, and appeals to ex-Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling (now serving 24 years and 4 months in a federal prison) to provide letters to ex-employees that release them from non-compete provisions in their contracts.
Finally, it captures some of the opposition to Enron’s efforts to build plants, as one particularly heated 2001 email sent to Enron’s public relations team captures. “Take your fat, lawsuit-happy-pig Eric Thode [ex-Enron spokesman and Republican party chairman in Fort Bend, Texas] and get the fuck out of South Florida,” the email notes, adding that “we will stop you.”
Mr. Thode’s response: “I suspect that I am not going to receive a birthday present or Christmas card from this fellow. What do you think? This is the type of e-mail that we usually receive from our friends in California. Looks like the disease is spreading to other areas.”
CaliforniaNext MovesAs for Trampoline, the angel-backed startup is nearly ready to look for a first round of venture funding, now that the product it used on the Enron database—dubbed Sonar—came out of beta in October. Sonar’s final release is due out in early 2007.
“We’re getting a great response from large enterprises who can see how sonar's social-powered approach to information management can help meet some of their most pressing needs,” Mr. Armstrong said.
Asked if he had any plans to make any other corporate scandal datasets searchable, Mr. Armstrong said he’s looking for candidates.
“I think the courts released a chunk of Hewlett-Packards instant messenger files but it's probably too small to be really interesting,” he said. “We'll just have to wait for the federal investigators to give us some new material to work with!” It’s a safe bet that they won’t be waiting long.
Contact the writer: SWolfe@redherring.com
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