He references an interesting concept called Conway's Law, a law stating that: organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
Thanks, I knew the law but hadn't seen the original article. It's eerie how broadly it applies -- as another example, my degree program has 5 tracks. One of the tracks is an utterly essential topic, really the core of the discipline, and the other 4 map directly onto the tangential research areas that the most influential professors cluster into. Guess which track is being cut this year...
Here's a link to the article Melvin Conway wrote describing this insight: http://www.melconway.com/research/committees.html
Also the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conways_Law