For example, you may find that without reorganizing corporate data, you cannot provide the organization with a Resources layer. Let's look briefly at how each layer might map to applications in a typical corporate computing infrastructure today, and what actions an IS planner might begin to take. For example, most applications are designed as a fat client with considerable logic and data. Corporate IT planners should begin to look at building new applications without including a lot of logic at the desktop - even if there is enough memory and disk to support a fat client. In most applications today, routing of information and data from one place to another requires complex coding.
Applications often have hard-coded references to locations of logic and data.
Even ORBs, for the most part, hard-code the locations of information. To support a virtual corporation, begin to look for technologies that dynamically locate key data and logic as well as keep track of the state transitions. Don't be surprised if this is hard to find. Only a few technologies are working on this type of abstraction. Experimenting with these self-contained environments will help you get started.