On my Capgemini Blog www.capgemini.com/ctoblog someone
posted a very insightful comment recently;

 

“If you are a carpenter with a
traditional saw and you buy a motor powered bench saw (new technology) then you
had better change the way you work because lifting up the new bench saw and
taking it to the wood certainly isn’t going to make your job easier”

 

And in so doing drew attention to
the challenge of changing working process to maximise the use of new
technology. Right at the heart of this is the basic problem of management communication,
or lines of communication and responsibility so maybe it might help if I draw
attention to the following?

 

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’s thesis, the piece of work that gave birth to the concept of 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
an organisation to market, will always mimic the enterprise’s 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 but you
can get a more up to date view from 2008 work at Harvard Business
School and at Microsoft
Research. To understand the interest and why it comes up at times when technology
innovation 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 now in
the context of clouds.

 

Each of our technology eras 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 ‘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 people’s
expertise, if we are still working with the communications capabilities and
organisational structure of matrix working? Who pays for this collaborative
stuff? It’s the email issue of 1990 all over again! Back in the ‘90s email
arrived in the enterprise as increasing numbers of groups of workers started
using different email products to be able to do the work that was now expected
of them. So the fundamental driving force of optimisation of the enterprise
ended up being held back through the fragmentation of the communications
structure.

 

It’s the same today, everywhere
across the enterprise the people with the most ‘active’ roles that can really
make a difference to optimising events and opportunities are organising
collaboration tools for their own group. At the top, denial of the need, or the
fact that this is happening at all, is all too often the order of the day. Hence,
why Conway’s
law is back again. It’s there to help us all to understand the link to
communications and organisational structures, when discussing how to change our
business models. 

 

It even helps to explain some things in the last year
or two!  Try this December 2009