Organizations design systems that mirror their communication structures.
Conway published it in 1968 after a paper on it was rejected. Microsoft Office's historic feature duplication across applications tracked the separate product teams that built them.
In practice
- Four teams that never meet ship four incompatible authentication systems.
- A university with separate faculties produces a student record system with separate faculty modules and no shared view of the student.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- How organisations behave when nobody is steering