Veröffentlichungen von Elias Grewe

Conway’s Law states that organizations develop systems that reflect their communication structures. Our study aims to test this hypothesis by analyzing the technical software architectures and correlating the software modularity with collaboration network characteristics. The collaboration network includes all interactions where two authors recently changed the same code. Higher-quality software architectures, plainly speaking, are more modular. They display a low complexity, and individual code unit sizes are small. Our regression models show a strong link between network and architectural modularity. We also demonstrate that an excessive concentration of expertise is associated with lower architectural quality. These findings support Conway’s Law and suggest that enhancing modularity in organizational structures may improve technical architecture by separating concerns into modules, thus informing the work of Enterprise Architects who produce their technical architectures in-house. Moreover, it aligns with the idea of agility, where modular teams work autonomously on specific parts of the technical architecture.

McAfee and Brynjolfsson (2008) provided evidence that the steep rise of information technology investments in the 1990s did not only yield higher overall productivity but also accelerated the competitive nature of U.S. industries. These changes have, among others, been attributed to a more efficient and quick propagation of innovative business processes due to information technology. Our paper sets out (a) to replicate their findings and (b) to extend their study by analyzing more recent trends. We compare over 60 U.S. industries between 1987 and 2018 by regressing IT intensity on three different measures of industry competition: sales turbulence, industry concentration, and performance spread of gross profit margin. The regression models indicate that industries that spend more on IT still display relatively higher competitive dynamics, but that, after a strong uprise between 1995 to 2005, there has been a substantial slowdown and trend reversal after 2005. Together, this indicates both a shift from information technology being a strategic differentiator to a strategic "must-have" commodity in firms and an indication that the majority of digital innovations are rather of a combinatorial than of a disruptive nature as they help top performers to continuously build out their superior market position.