Social organization and the technologies within it are very important. In small groups, such as companies and development teams, personalities can have enormous affect on what gets produced and how. While there is the assumption that companies are organized around SME (subject mater experts) which is taken to a departmental level, largely they are barriers to communication rather than aids, and secondly they do fix into place the allocation of resources and responsibilities such that innovation and quick response to changing external (not internal) pressures become impossible. From here:

The other key difference with the Shuttle group was the deliberate suppression of creativity expressed in code, and the channeling of that creativity into changing and fixing the process. Melvin Conway observed in 1968 that "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations".

Or if your organization had 12 groups, they'd usually design a system with 12 major modules. Furthermore, the quality of the interfaces between those modules will reflect the quality of the communication between employees of each group.

The statement that the interfaces reflect the quality of communication between the groups is very true. At my previous employer the point of greatest volatility was also the point of the greatest distrust and lack of communication. We developed a good working relationship with the individuals in that group - who were great people. Their indifference in communication was largely a result of being over-worked, having a poor system for debugging and data storage, and the impersonal nature of the JIRA system we used where it was easy to 'throw things over the wall'.

I booked into my outlook calender times to just chat and say hi to that group in order to develop trust and friendship. I also went further in trying to isolate the exact line and row in their data that was the issue which meant wading through horrible tars of spreadsheets to determine what the issue was. In the end our entire team adopted that process and the communication between our two groups was positive to the point of genuine friendship and caring. The process took about six months though. In the project as I left that group was not the weakest part of the software system either.