How to Scale an Organization? The Same Way You Scale a System!
Horizontal scaling seems more natural
The digital world is all about scalability: millions of websites,
billions of hits per month, petabytes of data, more tweets, more images
uploaded. To make this work, architects have learned a ton about scaling
systems: make services stateless and horizontally scalable, minimize
synchronization points to maximize throughput, keep transaction scope
local, avoid synchronous remote communication, use clever caching
strategies, and shorten your variable names (just kidding!).
With everything around us scaling to never-before-seen throughput, the
limiting element in all of this is bound to be us, the human users, and the
organizations we work in. You might wonder, then, whether IT architects, who know so much about scalability, can apply their expertise to scaling and optimizing throughput in organizations. I might have become an architect astronaut1 suffering from oxygen deprivation due to exceedingly high levels of abstraction, but I can’t help but feel that many of the
scalability and performance approaches known to experienced IT
architects can just as well be applied to scaling organizations. If a coffee shop (Chapter 17) can teach us about maximizing a system’s throughput, maybe our knowledge of IT systems design can help improve an organization’s ...
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