How Does Implementing Microservices to Create Clouds Influence an Organization's Design?

Brief introduction of study:

This article is part of my masters' thesis in Digital Leadership (Applied IT department of Gothenburg University in Sweden). The main title is: "Do Product and Organizational Architectures Simply "Mirror"?" I have conducted this empirical research by carrying out eleven interviews, about 553 minutes. The representatives are from an innovation center of a company in the automotive industry. Due to the fact that there are ongoing projects in the company to deliver digital services, we anonymize the name of the company. 

Why This Subject Is Vital in The Digital Transformation Journey:

Companies have considerably invested in new technologies. Now they desire to exploit it in different aspects. This has notably resulted in embedding software and digital capabilities in products. Digital services encounter high modification as they never end but become part of subsequent versions. Therefore, companies are willing to adapt to new market demands in the shortest time and independently through various dimensions of their services. One of the latest approaches to access flexibility is applying microservices. It is the newest software architecture design. Many large companies, e.g., Netflix, Linked In, and Amazon, have transformed their software architecture. Today, the automotive industry is strong in utilizing microservice design. It enables companies to create cloud applications and accelerate innovation.

What Previous Studies Imply:

The mirroring hypothesis refers to the casual relationship between products and organizations' architectures. Scholars across disciplines have asserted that mirroring is either necessary or a highly desirable feature of development projects. However, developing modularization and loose coupling seem to provide greater interoperability of components and new arrangements where participants work together more closely. This linkage between product and organization is crucial because it profoundly influences the product's functionality, variety, and industry evolution.

What The Finding of The Study Is:

This study implies that in implementing microservice architecture, the organization tends to have more tightly coupled intra communication. The reasons we have found to shape the organization's denser communication pattern

1.      Necessitate of integrating multiple perspectives and knowledge in deploying loosely coupled architecture.

2.      The crucial role of early design decisions on product performance.

3.      Organizations use close communication mechanisms as a tool to maintain the modularity of the product's architecture and balance the loosely coupled structure challenges, e.g., ambiguity, duplication, and lack of shared understanding.

4.      Applying microservices drives organizations to more knowledge dependencies, which calls for more collaboration.

5.      The newness of this designing style and lack of human resource experiments.

Therefore, it is essential for companies to bear in mind that digital transformation is a sociotechnical subject. It will benefit the company just if all aspects grow and align simultaneously. 

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