02:Architecture: The Title vs. the Role

Friday, 16 July 2010

Many companies, when asked, would proudly state that they have Architects in their ranks. They may even continue on to tell you about the types of Architects they employ such as Technical Architects, Solutions Architects, Enterprise Architects, Software Architects etc... While this sounds very warm and fluffy this should always be followed up by a second question.

“So what is your company’s overall technical strategy?”

This is a killer question, because this is often a difficult question to answer concisely. If it is not an easy question to answer, I would argue that the company you are interacting with have Architects in title but not in role.

Let me explain what I mean; The Architecture role is one that looks into the future and readies the company for the technical challenges that are on the horizon. Often (if you’re lucky) Architects may create the technical opportunities on the horizon. The role also ensures consistency of approach and implementation of reusability, to drive technical efficiency on the company; not to mention the day job which consists of actually architecturally designing the systems that are being created.

All of the above requires a clearly established and well understood technical strategy for the company as a whole. If this strategy does not exist the Architects become frustrated because they then default to the generic and highly idealistic role description of being the Architect they aspired to become one day. In the absence of a strong technical strategy this is equivalent to giving your architect a rope to hold between their teeth and telling them to swim at a tangent to an oil-tanker (No reference to BP intended here ;-), trying to make it change direction.

A Technical Strategy, like a Vision statement, is a critical requirement. Even a bad one is acceptable, but there has to be one. The bad ones will mature over time and have the possibility to improve, but where there exists nothing, only chaos can prevail.

If you’re a frustrated Architect, ask your CTO (or the person filling this role) to clearly articulate the company’s technical strategy until it makes sense to you. At least when you know what the company’s strategy is and you decide you don’t like it, you can at least make a rational decision to go in search of your dreams elsewhere.

Without a clear Strategy you may assign the “Architect” title to one or more individuals, but your company is holding them back from actually performing there role.