29 November 2010 - 12:39Conway’s Law

I read today a very interesting post on Dan Prichett’s blog on the way the IT architecture of a large organization is affected by the structure of the organization. For a while I have grown convinced that most of the decisions regarding IT are determined by the underlying organization, but I have not seen it stated so clearly. It is a pretty important statement because it identifies clearly what influences IT architecture the most.

However, I don’ think that the solution proposed by Dan Prichett to correcting the IT inefficiencies can be applied easily to any organization. I see the IT architecture driving the structure of the organization, rather than the reverse, happening mostly in IT-centric companies (*). I don’ see an insurance company or a distribution chain changing the way they do business solely for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of IT. For a typical company IT is a sunk-cost rather than a strategic asset (**), restructuring a company in order to minimize this particular set of costs, possibly at the expense of other concerns, does not make much sense.
Adapting the IT infrastructure to the organization, and not the reverse, will be the norm for the foreseeable future. In most cases the best that IT can do is to try to reduce costs by automation of various tasks across the organization rather than try to define the organization.

Later Edit: Another reason why aligning the organization with the architecture (rather than the opposite) does not apply all the time is that refactoring the architecture will imply re-structuring the organization in order to align it with the new architecture. The already high costs or re-architecting the IT infrastructure may become prohibitive.

* I would call an IT-centric company a company that proposes services built around IT or that derives a  competitive advantage from its IT infrastructure. Examples of such companies are eBay, Amazon, Google, online shops, online media companies, etc… In these type of companies we may derive the organization from the architecture of IT systems because in doing so we enhance the competitive advantage of that company.

** For IT-centric companies this does not apply, in their case IT is a strategic asset.