To date, architects very often operate as soloists. Soloists with a knowledge of construction paradigms, patterns, technologies, methods, etc. But as the construction space keeps expanding, the required knowledge is increasing: technology stacks and tiers are added, construction techniques evolve, the line between off-the-shelve and bespoke development is fading and reusable services are becoming commodities and their number growing rapidly. As a result the architect (and engineering) population will specialise more and more.

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Lately I have been involved in discussions on the role of models in enterprise architecture. Some people seem to think that an enterprise architecture describes detailed models of current and future situations. Typically these models are stored in an enterprise repository, that could also be filled partially by other sources such as the configuration management database or sourcecode files. Let's step back a little bit to look at the role of models in architecture in general.

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My vision on architecture is that it is all about making fundamental choices, and influencing the right people in order to achieve the required change. This means that architecture is also very much concerned with change management and stakeholder management. I also believe that architecture should combine top-down and bottom-up views.

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The future will bring more and more surprising products based on the reuse of digital 'residue'. These residue based products are products created on the residue of other products. To illustrate let me give you some examples:
- mobile phone positioning data (a residue mobile phone users leave when then are linked to the network) to calculate car traffic; a valuable input for car navigation devices (e.g. Vodafone and TomTom);
- (tagged) bookmarks collected by individual users in their browser can be used to build resource taxonomies (e.g. del.icio.us, mypip.com). An intranet version would be a simple and probably very effective way to manage corporate knowledge (especialy when it also enables highlighting).
- gaming data (e.g. a game to find similar characteristics) to create picture indexes; a valuable input for a search engine wanting to improve the relevance of image search (e.g. the espgame.org and peekaboom.org).

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Applications get more and more detached form the infrastructure they are running on. The same goes for the architectures of both. In the most extreme scenario, architectural design choices related to the infrastructure are made completely independent from the applications running on the infrastructure. For applications, the infrastructure in most cases is a given. One could compare the relationship between applications and the infrastructure with the way electrical appliciances relate to electricity (loosely coupled with plugs and sockets).

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The importance of creativity as a strategic competence is growing rapidly; it is key to survival in the next era. Creativity is not limited to products and services but also to the way value chains / networks are structured and the nodes (partners) in the network are implemented. Technology will penetrate deeper and deeper in the execution and will push humans out of significant parts of the value chain. This transformation is not an optimisation of today's operating model. In order to make this transformation happen, organisations will have to brake free from the architectural paradigms of the past and open up for a fundamental new way of building.

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