The Effect of Company Culture on Application Development

How the underlying culture of a company affects design.

My early professional career was all in large, well establsihed (FTSE100) companies, and therefore my early experiences of IT were shaped in what I like to consider a very rigourous and disciplined way. I like to think of myself as old School and proud of it.

However since becoming a consultant I've worked at varying sizes of companies and have therefore become exposed to other ways of working. What strikes me most is how much the underlying culture of the company pervades every way of working. Like some secret predicate that is present on every decision.

Two examples.

I worked for one of the largest retailers in the world for over a decade, where the underlying culture was global expansion, scalable, repeatable etc. This affected every decision in application design and no-one would ever dare not take a decision that was pragmatic or tactical, however appropriate that could have been.

More recently I've worked in a startup organisation with less than 20 employees, where money is tight, the revenue stream is far from garuanteed and it's the corporate equivalent of a hand to mouth existence. This means that every IT decision is pragmatic, tactical, low cost, here and now.

Now in both instances, it was often not an explicit part of the requirements that the solution needed to meet these underlying requirments. It's just that everyone conformed. Further more, the culture wasn't necessarily purposefully dictated. ie the culture formed on it's own, regardless of whether it was in the best interests of the company.

So beware of the underlying culture of an organisation as it might lead to architectural and design decisions that aren't appropriate, just because every does it that way...