In 1968 Melvin Conway published an observation that has since outlived most of the technology it was written about: organizations that design systems are constrained to produce designs that copy their own communication structures. It sounds like a curiosity. It is closer to a law of physics. Siloed departments produce siloed systems. Departmental budgets produce departmental technology choices. Teams measured locally produce locally optimized architectures. None of this requires anyone to make a bad decision — every actor can behave sensibly within their scope and the result is still fragmentation, because no one is accountable for the whole. This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion for anyone who owns an architecture function: governance cannot win this fight indefinitely. You can publish principles, run review boards, and maintain a target-state model, and the organization will still quietly re-fragment your systems — faster than governance can integrate them — as long as repor...
One idea per post, distilled from a book a week, articles and the podcasts I follow — with the flashcards I use to remember it