[JPGalt]

I am aware of this theoretical law but never really considered it. I suppose this could explain why I encountered such push back against a distributed SOA architecture on commodity hardware at a large organization that was built around centralized systems using mainframes.

Ultimately after three years of justifying and re-justifying the decisions I made for which they explicitly hired me for I moved on. It was abundantly clear that though they brought me in to implement SOA and lower physical costs, the culture just did not support that decision. What struck me as odd was that fact that those who hired me to do it did not seem to support it either.

I should note that Conway's law seems like a reasonable assumption as to why due to the monolithic and centralized nature of communication there. It was considered "taboo" to walk in to an executive managers office to speak to them. The expectation was to follow this ridiculously verbose chain of command whereby response to even a simple question could take days or even weeks.

[cagenut]

  > The expectation was to follow this ridiculously verbose chain of command 
  > whereby response to even a simple question could take days or even weeks.

oh so they already did SOA

[tabtab]

I can't get a clear meaning of "SOA". Data and processes have been shared for many decades. Stored procedures are a common example of such before the Web era. Shoving stuff into JSON doesn't necessarily make it better, and often creates more maintenance work. Do things for a clear reason, not because it's in style.