We fought Conaway's law and the law won
Conway's law says systems, software, and wetware, end up shaped like the organizational structure that designed them or that they are designed for.
Organizations understand this at some level. Much of the corporate re-organization efforts are fed by people trying to change the corporate structure to push closer together the people creating a new paradigm or system. The other main approach is to live with the partitioning that aligns with the organizational structure allowing any global redundancy or other inefficiencies.
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We see the same behavior for non-software ecosystems. Chevy aligns their divisions by subsystems. Today they have sold much of their engineering and parts design to other companies further splitting up the overall design. This drives them to create a cooling system for each subsystem. Tesla is smaller and only has one engineering group for this type of thing. They have a single pump that handles all needs. The Federal Government has 65 different departments that carry guns and can make arrests. This is because the alignment of their policing structures aligns with their organizational boundaries. |
Expanding just a little, shared responsibility makes it accountability difficult. There is no "one throat to choke" in situations where the management of partner teams are far apart. |
Conway's Law was derived sometime in the 1960s. Organizations may be more nimble or more connected but this part of human nature hasn't changed. Ignore Conway's law at your own peril. |
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