It is generally accepted that well-designed applications today have clear divisions between user interface, business rules, and data. This logical division of an application allows significant flexibility in adapting the user interface over time, or applying the business rules to new data sources. This approach also encourages a vertical view of applications, eliminating the economies of scale that could be achieved by linking application design, infrastructure usage, and component reuse across functional departments. This is in direct opposition to the changes happening right now in business. As business processes become streamlined and hierarchies flattened, employees are being asked to take on a broader range of activities.
New tasks span the traditional functional boundaries.
Information systems must evolve to accommodate this trend. Business applications should allow users to perform more activities and take on more complex transactions, without having to learn more applications. For example, the way a user views, locates and modifies information about a customer should be consistent across all applications in the system so employees can easily move from one application to another. This requires fine-tuning the generally accepted approach. Without a fine-tuned application model, certain obstacles to success are predictable.