Follow the Money

Chapter 3. Patrons Shape Organizations: A Quick Survey

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In the last chapter, I introduced the concept of the patron to describe any entity that bestows something of value to the client based on their will or preference. This book argues that the structure of an organisation’s patrons drives the organisation’s structure which, via Conway’s Law, constrains the software architecture.

In this chapter, I briefly explore some of the different patterns of patronage using anonymised case studies and well-known businesses, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Meta, as examples. I hope to give you a feeling for some of the factors you need to consider when analysing a software organization’s capacity to change. From this you can understand the limits of what can be achieved, and, conversely, what may be possible if the right organisational levers are pulled.

The Business as a System

If you consider any organisation that makes software as a system, then typically it has certain characteristics. It needs resources in order to continue to exist, most commonly money. ...