Conways Law and IT as the Canary in the Corporate Mineshaft
Just reading "Confused of Calcutta" which comes recommended by the irrepressible Rageboy.
On the site JP posts on
Four Pillars: Thinking about enterprise architecture
* 1. An enterprise IT department is a window into the soul of the enterprise itself.
* 2. An enterprise’s IT strategy is a reflection of its business strategy.
* 3. An enterprise’s IT architecture is a reflection of its organisation structure.
* 4. Centralisation versus decentralisation, global versus regional, many-layered versus not-many-layered, these are all red herrings. What matters is High Cohesion and Loose Coupling, with its consequent empowerment, lack of duplication and consistency.
* 5. These statements hold true regardless of the perceived quality of the organisation or of its IT department, in-house or outsourced. You cannot game the system.
JP's laws to me are a restatement of Conways law
"CONWAYS LAW [1968] "organizations which [sic] design systems...are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."
THis requires a longer and more detailed post but I'd suggest two links
*The original statement of Conway's Law
How Do Committees Invent?
by Melvin E. Conway
* And the very explicit drawing of the implications for enterprise architecture in
Conway's Law Revisited: Successfully Aligning Enterprise Architecture
Date: May 1, 2002 By David Dikel, David Kane. Article is provided courtesy of Prentice Hall PTR.
I've seen this referenced a few places recently, most notably by Donald Norman