Thomas OtterFrom Mel Conway’s website.
In 1967 I submitted a paper called "How Do Committees Invent?" to the Harvard Business Review. HBR rejected it on the grounds that I had not proved my thesis. I then submitted it to Datamation, the major IT magazine at that time, which published it April 1968.
Here is one form of the paper’s thesis:
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure
This was on my mind at Sapphire last week. To understand the road maps and legacies of software vendors, especially the big ones, you really need to understand how they are organized and have been organized. The code reflects the organization reality. Grasping the shifts in the organization was one of my main goal at the event, as this gives us more insight into the company strategy than press releases, keynotes and powerpoints do.
The first German Chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck once said
„Je weniger die Leute wissen,
wie Würste und Gesetze gemacht werden,
desto besser schlafen sie!“
This loosely translates as the less people know how sausage and laws are made, the better they will sleep.With large software vendors I’d suggest it is the opposite. The more you know about how your software is being made the better, as only then can you really understand the products and the strategy.
Here is the organisation chart of The Tabulating Machine Co, which eventually became IBM.
photo credit CC flickr. Thankyou Marcin Wichary for an excellent series of computer history images.
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Category: software industry Tags: conway's law, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP
