Exploring the duality between product and Organizational Architectures
Subtitle: a test of the mirroring hypothesis
By: Alan D. MacCormack, John Rusnak, Carliss Y. Baldwin .
Contributors: Rusnak, John; Baldwin, Carliss Y. (Carliss Young); Harvard Business School
Series: Working paper / Harvard Business School -- 08-039; Working paper (Harvard Business School) -- 08-039
Publisher: Harvard Business School
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Boston]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 27
Description: A variety of academic work asserts that a relationship exists between the structure of a development organization and the architecture of the products that this organization produces. Specifically, products are often said to "mirror" the architectures of the organizations from which they come. Such a link, if confirmed empirically, would be important, given that product architecture has been shown to be an important predictor of, among other things: product performance; product variety; process flexibility; and future industry evolution. We explore this relationship in the software industry by use of a technique called Design Structure Matrices (DSMs), which allows us to visualize the architectures of different software products and to calculate metrics to compare their levels of modularity.
Notes: "March 2008"--Publisher's web site.

Includes bibliographical references.