As long as the manager's prestige and power are tied to the size of his budget, he will be motivated to expand his organization. This is an inappropriate motive in the management of a system design activity. Once the organization exists, of course, it will be used. Probably the greatest single common factor behind many poorly designed systems now in existence has been the availability of a design organization in need of work.

This is a great point, and it's not widely understood. Organizations always try to grow, and once they've grown, they will continue to do work, regardless of whether that's what anyone actually wants or needs them to do.

For example, say a popular website has gone a long time without much design work, and people are complaining that the site is hard to use. In response, the people in charge of the website form a design team, which succeeds in redesigning the site. But now that there's a design team, they will continue to do design work, and the site will likely be redesigned periodically. This will happen regardless of whether anyone actually using the site wants a new design.

To put it differently, committees don't invent. People invent. Committees coordinate (or gather, edit, filter, etc.).

So if three people invent three things, and they form a committee to put the parts together, then they typically end up with a thing having three parts.

This way of looking at it makes it all seem much less mysterious and profound, IMHO.

This is the most practical and important paper I have read this year, and I'm doing a masters in Information Systems.

Maybe this is the true reason why Google lets engineers rule ?

Restricting them in hard ways essentially implies that the software produced would just reflect the final bureaucracy?