MaccormackEtAl2008exploring

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MacCormack, A.D. and Rusnak, J. and Baldwin, C.Y.

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@article{MaccormackEtAl2008exploring,

 title={{Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the Mirroring Hypothesis}},
 author={MacCormack, A.D. and Rusnak, J. and Baldwin, C.Y.},
 journal={Harvard Business School Working Papers},
 year={2008},
 publisher={Harvard Business School}

}

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abstract

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chap1 Introduction

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.3

Much recent research points to the critical role of product architecture in the successful development of a firm's new products and services, the competitiveness of its product lines and the successful evolution of its technical capabilities (e.g....."some references")

Henderson and Clark show that incumbent firms often stumble when faced with innovations that are "architectural" in nature. They assert that these dynamics occur because product designs "mirror" the organizations that develop them, a concept that is somtimes referred to as duality.

DSMs: Design Structure matrices

open source (or "free") software, which is characterized by:
a) the distribution of a program's source code along with the binary version of the product
b) a license that allows a user to make unlimited copies of and modifications to this product

Successful open source software projects tend to be characterized by large, distributed terms fo volunteer developers who contribute new features, fix defects in exisiting code and write documentation for the product (Raymond,,,,,,). These developers, which can number in the hundreds, are located around the globe hence often never meet.

#pp

.4
Given this proximity, the sharing of information about solutions being adopted in different parts of the design is much easier, and may even be encouraged (e.g., if the creation of a dependency between two parts of a design would lead to increased performance).

chap. 2: Research Motivation

The architecture of a product is the scheme by which the functions it performs are allocated to its constituent components ().

#pp

. 5

The roots of this work
1) organization theory
organizations should be designed to reflect the nature of the tasks that they perform (2refs).

2)transaction cost theory
transaction cost theory predicts that different organizational forms are required to effectively solve the contractual challenges associated with tasks that possess different levels of uncertainly and interdependency (2 refs.)

To the degree that different product architectures require a different set of tasks to be performed, this work suggests that organizations and architecures must be aligned.

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. 6
dominant design = Utterback 1996

Sec. 2.1 Product Architecture......

Modularity is the way that a product design is decomposed into different parts or modules.

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. 8
The formal study of software modularity began with Parnas(1972) who proposed the concept of informaiton hiding as a mechanism for dividing code into modular units.

Some authers argue that open source software is inherently more modular than proprietary software (2 refs). Others suggest that modularity is a required property for this method to succeed (1ref).ß

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