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).

The infrastructure architecture is clearly not a business matter (though it requires business input to set the requirements). The application architecture however is becoming more and more a business matter. The role of the application architecture is shifting dramatically from a support role to a strategic role. In line with this shift, the interest of the business in appliction architecture has increased significantly.

There are a number of developments supporting this shift:
- True open standards enabling the layering of complexity. As a result the top level of the application stack (the user interaction) is becoming less complex with a multitude of resource to integrate. In near future a significant part of the top level will be controlled by end users (see for example pageflakes and labpixies).

- A wave of tools aimed at the rapid and easy development of state-of-the-art web-applications by business analysts (see for example edgeConnect).
- A wave of easy to integrate off-the-shelve implementations of business services (for example all ERP / CRM / ECM vendors who don't want to miss the boat).

- New high productivity languages / frameworks for implementing new business services (see for example waterlanguage and SCA / SDO).

An evitable result is that more and more application architects specialised in the top tiers (business users and processes) will operate directly under the business with minimum or no involvement from the IT department. Business management will become the end-to-end owner of the top tiers of the application architecture stack.

The content presented in this editorial reflects the personal opinion of the author.

Copyright notice: This publication is based on the principle of open content

Erik Vermeulen is director of Stichting Digital Architecture and member of the Via Nova Architectura editorial board.

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