Description

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which reflect the communication structures of these organizations. This has important implications for the management of system design: Any organization that designs a system will inevitably produce a design whose structure reflects the organization’s communication structure. This phenomenon can be construed as humorous to the extent that rigid organizations, which are not willing to re-organize an optimal design can end up producing a sub-standard design which merely reflects the pre-existing organization. It is shown how information flows between people within an organization with the result that the information flow of an organization “mirrors” the production process. In order to provide empirical evidence, two examples of matched pair software products are explored. Two design structures of similar size and function are compared, one developed by an open source model and the other one by a closed proprietary one. As a result, the examined pairs reveal substantial differences in the levels of modularity between the software systems.