Organizational Design and Engineering

Most readers of this blog are probably familiar with Conway’s Law. So named by Fred Brooks in the “Mythical Man-Month” and popularized by the saying “if you have four teams working on a compiler you will get a four-pass compiler.” This sociological observation stipulates that the social architecture of a corporation i.e. its organizational hierarchy determines the technical architecture of its products. My industry experience supports this observation and I made fun of it as early (for me) as 1996.

Now Rodrigo Magalhaes and Antonio Rito Silva of Technical University of Lisbon are expanding this and related observations into a full-blown research area called “organizational design and engineering”. You are invited to submit to and participate in

• the 2009 International Workshop on Organizational Design and Engineering (IWODE ’09) and
• the International Journal of Organisational Design and Engineering (IJODE)

I’ll be helping as member of the IWODE ’09 program committee and as a member of the IJODE editorial board. Please find appended the Call for Papers for IWODE ’09 as a PDF file.