Architecture and Communication among Product Development Engineers

This paper summarizes some quantitative measures and qualitative observations that we have made regarding the effective of architecture on technical communication.We begin with some early results, showing how the probability that two organizations' members will communicate regularly declines rapidly with the distance between their work locations. .Following this, we Three Types of Technical Communication Classification DescriptionType I Communication to coordinate the work.Communication to maintain staff knowledge of new developments in their areas of specialization. Type IIICommunication to promote creativity.The Effects of Proximity.People who work nearby come to know each other better are much more likely to know and understand what each other is doing and consequently can coordinate their work better.In a similar fashion, when the issue is keeping informed of developments inside or outside the organization, physical proximity to those with knowledge of the developments increases the likelihood of learning of them.So proximity or the distance among work sites affects communication patterns and may support or interfere with the goals of any organizational structure.Managers are generally well aware of this and normally try to map physical locations so that they match the organizational structure.This reinforces the intent of the organizational structure, but as we will see later in this paper, can often lead to less than optimal results.Reflected in Communication Networks.In our early studies (Allen, 1984) we devised a technique for mapping organizational communication networks.We had not spent very much time analyzing organizational communication networks before we began to see the effect that the physical location of people had on them.One does not have to look very long at a network such as that in Figure 1, to suspect that something may be interfering with the communication between the two distinct groupings.A little further investigation reveals that the cleavage is not organizational.All of the people are in the same department.Some even share projects with people in the other cluster.It turns out that one of the clusters is on the second floor of a building and the other one is housed on the fifth floor of the same building.What seems like a modest separation between people in the same building has, indeed, a profound effect on their interaction patterns.Now, the fact that there are no arrows connecting the two groups does not mean that there is no communication between them.It merely means that any communication that did occur was not sufficiently frequent' to be recognized in the figure.