It's time to kill the "Department" department

David Armano has a great post up on his blog titled "It's time to kill the art department."  The point of the post is that the idea that we build better products and ideas when the our company's structure is fluid - when the entire company environment, right down to the way we delegate and organize our responsibilities, is based on solving whatever specific problem your working on.  He talks about this specifically in light of not dividing your company into different departments.

This really resonates with me in our field of RIA development.  As a developer, I hate the idea that I don't have good ideas about design, and I'd hate to work in a place that didn't encourage everyone to get involved in building the solution.  Just because we're trained as software developers doesn't mean we don't have good ideas on usability, interaction and design too.

Honing our designer/developer work flow to the point that those roles don't exist in isolation has been a big part of the past year at Effective UI and part of my experience here that I've really enjoyed.  It's one of the best parts of our company and something that I feel gives us an edge over organizations who still isolate their teams.