In almost every client I worked with, I detected an instinctive feeling amongst my fellow designers (or where we architects!?) that the operational viewpoint is more physical than the functional. But I also detected that they meant it was more "real", that the functional viewpoint provides them with a more abstract way of thinking about the IT system, because it actively chooses to ignore more of the "real world's" issues.
Only when we discussed the difference between "physical" and "real" did the light dawn, that thinking functionally was no less "physical" than thinking operationally - both consider the implementations of technology to be used - whether that be a CRM package from vendor X, or a Linux platform from vendor Y.
And, just as equally, both viewpoints reason about the specification of their parts - what each part has to do and how well it has to do it - how else could decisions on implementations be made? (Oh, I forgot... "the answer's OS/2, what's the problem?" :-) )
So thinking "logically" and "physically" is ANOTHER powerful consideration - pair of viewpoints - to thinking "functional and operational", and "application and infrastructure". That's three orthogonal ways (three separate pairs of viewpoints), from which to conceive, reason about and communicate the design of an IT system.
I think I need another "thinking model" to help me position these three dimensions...
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