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apps ('traditional' software) are nothing but databases, pushing
'information' to the screen as responses to user 'events'.

How the application data is kept (often in an embedded relational database)
and what the user sees on the screen are two very different things.  In a
movie editing application like iMovie, the user sees and interacts with
static and moving images against a timeline. All that graphic choreography
on the screen is really shifting around timecode (mapped against a byte
stream, the 'movie') stored in and fetched from an internal DB. If you can
imagine yourself, literally stripping away the graphical veneer, it's
nothing but a request-response loop to a DB, not unlike a web app, but with
a very different front-end. This is the view the programmer sees of the app.

The traditional method of creating 'traditional' software is one where, more
often than not, the programmer does the choreography between the screen/user
and the database/server. The designer doesn't often do much more than dress
up the dancers, as it were. The IA, who often doesn't speak this language
and can't participate at the foundation level, is usually late to the dance
and plays at the edges of the stage.

Architecture is supremely important in application design. Application
architects (as opposed to programmers) usually do this on large projects and
are a direct competitor to IAs, in giving shape/structure/architecture to an
app.

I could go on about this for days, but I'll end with a single example of
pure IA in a traditional app, that happens to be staring at me as I type
this email. The good folks at Microsoft Entourage (a mail/PIM app on OS X)
did a great job with 'Mail Views'. Since all the mail, notes, links,
calendar events, addresses, etc, are kept in an embedded DB in Entourage,
the app can cross reference any number of them arbitrarily. The user is able
to create 'Views' by creating filters that cover just about any attribute in
the Entourage DB. Thus you can create elaborate Views of your entire
mailbox/link/notes history from day one to today that present just the items
you would want to see. Can you spell 'faceted classification'?

Now if you are a designer you can look at this as a UI feature. If you are a
programmer, each view is nothing but a database query underneath. And if
you're into architecture, it's, well, information architecture, pure and
simple.

Best,

Ziya