The hidden hand of Government: Fall of the NSW Premier

All the news yesterday was about NSW Premier Morris Iemma's forced resignation. The build up to his eventual resignation it seems was some heavy lobbying (networking) on his part to try and win support for some of the radical changes we was looking to make to his front bench. So much for authoritarian rules...what happened to "I'm the boss, I make the decsions, I live by the consequences". I guess the Iemma example is just another example of "authoritarian no longer rules". So even when you are the boss you also have to be an astute networker, building the coalitions behind what you want to do. Life was no doubt a lot more simple when what the boss says goes....but I can't see this situation returning now.

So if you were the new Premier and you wanted to keep a tap on how your 'network' was doing wouldn't you love to be able to "net mine" the emails, text message, phone calls of your cabinet. You wouldn't even need to see the content, just the contact information would probably be sufficient. I recall seeing some data on the e-mail mining of the Enron e-mail store shortly before it collapsed. From memory the emails were shorter and much more frequent. I expect you would have seen the same thing if you were able to mine Morris Iemma's e-mail over the past week!