If you are a long serving
computing practitioner who has been through mainframes in data centres to mini
computers in departmental computing and then to PC Networks and IT you might
just recall hearing about Conway’s
Law. Well its coming back again as we move into Clouds! Melvin Conway thesis http://www.melconway.com/research/committees.html
 that gave birth to the concept that
became known as Conway’s
Law first surfaced in 1968 as part of the shift into departmental computers.
Essentially Conway’s
point was that in designing enterprise business models, computer solutions,
even products to take to market an organisation will always mimic its own
communication structure.

 

Conway’s Law = …organizations which
design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the
communication structures of these organizations.

 

Some good examples of what this
might look like, based on the original thesis, can be found on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Law
but you can get a more up to date view from 2008 work at Harvard Business
School http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-039.pdf
and at Microsoft Research http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=70535
. To understand the interest and why it comes up at times of technology
innovation that leads to business change, let me provide my own experience
relating first to what it meant at the time of PCs and Networks, then what it
means in the context of Clouds.

 

Each of our technology era has
resulted in a new business model, organisational structure, set of working
methods, and perhaps most importantly of all, a new competitive value
proposition. Okay that’s not a new point, but at each shift there has been a key
dependency on a core piece of technology which at the time seemed impossible to
justify within the existing communication and organisational model. Can
you imagine working without email? Well in the early 90s many, even most,
enterprises couldn’t figure out the business case for email.

 

At this time the organisational
model was both hierarchal and rigidly separated by departments each of which
had a departmental computer and set of applications that enabled them to
automate and keep track of their own processes and resulting data. Though some
office automation products existed such as IBM Personal Services and Digital
Equipment Corporation All-in-One, paper and the interoffice memo ruled.
Networked PCs and Client Server technology capabilities led to new business
models based around Business Process Re-Engineering, BPR, concentrating on
optimising the horizontal flow across the departments. On the people
organisational side this introduced Matrix working, a person’s ability to
perform their unique role in multiple different processes, and that’s when the
fun started!

 

Who was responsible to whom, and
for what? If the people still worked in departmental organisational structures
and the critical issue lay in a flow process in which their department performed
a minor role, how did the issue get communicated? Up the hierarchy within the
department until a departmental head spoke to another departmental head? Sounds
stupid now, but that’s how it was at first. The whole point about email was it
changed the who could communicate with whom and about what into a new
communications structure that enabled the flexibility of matrix working within
Business Processes rather than departments.

 

So how do we shift towards a
‘services’ model based on cloud technology with its inherent agility towards
frequent change and a focus on optimisation of events by deploying peoples’
expertise if we are still working with the communications capabilities and
organisational structure of matrix working? But who pays for this collaborative
stuff? It’s the email issue of 1990 all over again! Hence, why Conway’s law is back
again, its there to help us all to understand the link to communications and
organisational structures when discussing how to change our business
models. 

 

Its even helps to explain some things in the last year
or two!  Try this December 2009 blog post
on SAP Sapience http://hgumbel.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/business-by-design-%E2%80%93-conway%E2%80%99s-law-reconfirmed/