By John Conley III
In the IT world, and in particular in the software side of IT, the word “architect” has evolved into a gray, confused mess, to be honest. I like how Geeks with Blogs humorously stated the 2 biggest misconceptions about the architect role:
•An architect is simply a more senior/higher-earning developer with a fancy title
•An architect is someone who is technically useless, hasn’t coded in years but still throws around their weight in the business, making life difficult for developers
So what is an architect? The Gang of Four design patterns authors used the term in honor of real world building architects from the real estate world. These professionals create blueprints for houses and commercial buildings that a construction team takes and executes to the satisfaction of the original buyer. How does such an architect come up with the blueprint in the first place? They either work with a buyer to elicit that buyer’s vision, or they commission a focus group of people if they plan to speculate on the next generation of building trends. In either case, they start with a vision and use their education and skill to come up with a blueprint that makes sense to the construction team.
Similarly, IT Architects must also start with a vision from a buyer (executive stakeholder or business owner or their representative employee). Ideally, this vision is articulated in the form of a user story, but can come in the form of a plain vision statement or brainstormed list of requirements and desired outcomes. This vision often leads to the need for a software solution to be developed, which in turn drives database requirements, infrastructure requirements (hardware and networking capacity), security requirements, test planning, and software product planning beyond the initial production release (Product Management and DevOps). The “technology game plan” architectural blueprint to coordinate these downstream tech roles is often embodied in what’s called a Solution Architecture Design (SAD) document. (I am writing an article called “How to Write a Technology Game Plan for IT Projects” soon, which should help simplify the SAD template).
So how did the role of architect deviate from this simple concept?
Often, the architect word is not needed for every job title. An Application Architect role can be easily performed by a lead software developer, who works with a Solution Architect. A Solution Architect mainly evolved out of the software space and is a person who ensures that software developers have enough info in the technology “blueprint” to construct the solution using best practices, which sometimes include design patterns. For larger organizations, two or more IT projects may have very similar requirements. In this case, the Solution Architect also has to consider enterprise goals and constraints, such as legal, regulatory, and reusable components to be shared across projects.
As such, such organizations put together a team of Enterprise Architects to maintain a repository of reusable components, design patterns, and related enterprise policies. An Architecture Review Board is often employed to allow Solution Architects to present a Solution Architecture Design document to get approval before proceeding to the next phase of the project beyond the Vision phase (Inception or Initiation or whatever term you prefer). For some organizations, the Enterprise Architect role has been expanded to include Infrastructure Architecture. This has aided in some confusion.
An Infrastructure Architect is focused on client and server hardware requirements, and sometimes even network capacity planning. Since Enterprise Architects have traditionally come from the software development ranks, it is better to have an Infrastructure Architect as a member of the Enterprise Architecture team, rather than confuse the two. Possible naming candidates would be Enterprise Software Architect vs Enterprise Infrastructure Architect. Similar confusion has evolved with respect to Database Architects/Data Warehouse Architects. Enterprise Data Architect might help with such confusion as well. An article on LinkedIn by Murad Yousuf goes into more detail about the differences in the roles.
This article is an evolving one, so be sure to bookmark it and come back for the latest updates.
Samsona Corporation 