I was fascinated by a slide from Dr. Fusco’s class presentation the other evening. The slide represented the various application architecture approaches from the 1960’s to today. According to the slide, application architecture was originally focused on the organization, and in support of mainframe systems where the data was used internally. Later during the 1990’s, the focus went from the organization to the process. Technology was client-server based (meaning a client application on the workstation would make a call to a server to retrieve data, then update it and send it back, over a wired network). By the 2010’s, application architecture was about distributed functions – meaning those same workstations now pass messages back and forth to each other, and the messages are data-centric, and communicated in real-time.
Fusco, D. (n.d.). EA 874 – Class 2 [PPT].
Having worked in technology for much of the last 20 years, I’ve seen many of these changes happen, or in the case of my current industry, not happen. Application Architecture is used to collect Big Data, which has opened up a whole new word of Analytics. This ability to interpret the data, and drive organizational change based on it will I’m sure drive us forward to the next level. It will be interesting to see what that next level is and where we go from here.
(On a side note, according to the slide, client-server technology is perfect for EDI file transfers, which are still heavily used in the Health Insurance industry, and is much of what I support in my current role. So much for change.)