Sounds like a version of Conway's Law: "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organiza

Sounds like a version of Conway's Law: "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure." The assumption was that the communications structure would come first and then the design would imitate it, but with really ossified hard-to-change systems it seems plausible that the departmental organization would shape around it.