Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

7.2. CONWAY'S LAW AND ENTERPRISE SOA GOVERNANCE

As you consider organizational designs in support of your enterprise SOA governance model, you should bear in mind Conway's Law.^[] Conway's Law was coined by Fred Brooks in his famous book The Mythical Man-Month. Conway's Law is actually Brooks' application of concepts from Mel Conway's 1967 paper entitled "How Do Committees Invent?" The paper was submitted to the Harvard Business Review and rejected, and was subsequently submitted to Datamation magazine, the major IT publication of its time, and was published in 1968. The fundamental concept of Conway's papers is:

^[] This discussion is derived from Mel Conway's Web site, http://melconway.com/law/index.html

Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.^[]

^[] http://www.melconway.com/research/committees.html

Simply stated, a system designed by a given organization will reflect the organizational structure of said organization, often to the detriment of that system or software application. It is rare that an organization structures itself, or its software development organization, for the optimal creation of a software product or application.

Applying Conway's Law to SOA and SOA governance, we can say that there is a clear relationship between your organization, both business and IT organizations, and the resultant SOA strategy, governance ...