The concept has been adopted by a number of technology vendors to also describe the different layers of systems within an organisation.
A building properly conceived is several layers of longevity of built components" (quoted in (Brand, 1994)).
The work of Duffy and DEGW identified four shearing layers (Duffy, 1992): Brand expanded this list to six elements (Brand, 1994): The concept is based on the work of ecologists (O'Neill et al., 1985) and systems theorists (Salthe, 1993).
Their proposition is that firms need to look at how these application layers are governed, managed, sourced, maintained and interact to enable companies to better adapt and react to changing business requirements.
[1] The shearing layers concept has been applied to other man-made artifacts such as software (Simmonds et al., 2000;[2] Papantoniou et al., 2003) or the web (Campbell & Fast, 2006).