Obviously as a stakeholder and user of many organizational designs, I've been interested in organizational architecture for a long time. I began to see the relationship between system and organizational design, however, after a friend observed that "technology architecture tends to follow the organization", rather than the other way around (as you, or at least most, architects) would expect the world to behave.
In his First Law of Distributed Object Design ("Don't!"), Fowler argues that all system designs should limit the number of (internal and exgternal?) distribution boundaries. Sometimes this is called "limiting the exposed surface area". I believe this principle applies equally well to both man-made computer systems and organizations. System and Organization are both sub-classes of Organism.
P.S. A (different) friend has suggested that I need to find a couple of partners: the desired partnership name would be "Quid, Sovereign and Farthing". Anyone willing to change their names to Quid or Farthing?
Copyright John Sovereign, 2006
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What was the first instantiation of SOA?
Not COM, not CORBA, not Sun RPC...it was the Operating System. That was the first distribution boundary (aside from the human-machine boundary)....
Copyright John Sovereign, 2006
A friend shared the following "joke" which demonstrates a specific instance of the "architecture follows organization" anti-pattern.
The reference architectural pattern for a compiler is a 3-pass pipe/filter: lexical analyzer, parser and code generator.
A manager once divided his compiler group into four teams. Of course, he got a four-pass compiler.... 8-)>
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