Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.
Originally submitted in 1967 as How Do Committees Invent? to Harvard Business Review, but rejected. Published in Datamation maganize in April 1968. See bibliography description by the author himself here.
Melvin Conway stated this adague (as Wikipedia calls it) in 1967; quite early in commercial computing history. But things haven't changed that much.
While investigating about this statement, I learnt that it has its roots in software. Though it really applies to any domain.
The lesson to learn is: whenever something seems weird or inefficient, you can track its raison d'être to the organization of the teams originally involved in that thing. And everything will make sense (although will continue to be inefficient).