At the beginning of March I attended Microsoft's Architect Insight event in Newport, Wales. The event is run by Microsoft but the idea is to try and stimulate a community of interest around IT architecture. The flavour is therefore not so much "listen to what Microsoft is doing" and more "let's talk about what architecture is, what's difficult, what's important, and how we can do things better". I certainly found it pretty interesting.

One feature of the event was a series of workshop sessions set up to explore a kind of "taxonomy of IT architecture". Participants were positioned on tables with peers with similar job titles/experience and asked to focus on one or more roles, discussing what important features of those roles were and how the industry could potentially evaluate skills and experience. I could only attend one of the sessions, but at the session I managed to attend I was positioned on the "strategy architect" table.

Our small group was a bit non-plussed by this title, so instead we took things up a few levels and started with that perennial "what is an architect, anyway?".

Which is where I drew a version of this diagram:

The context of the drawing was this: we'd all come across people whose business cards said they were "architects", but who clearly weren't. Why not?

Well here's my hypothesis: if your role doesn't take you a fair way up at least two of the axes in the diagram, you're a re-branded systems analyst. In my view an architect:

• engages with multiple different stakeholders in doing their work—both from business and IT teams. They seek to engage those people to drive common understanding of the challenge, solution, costs and benefits and tradeoffs.
• plays some kind of role throughout the entire lifecycle of the IT investments they're involved in. Might not be hands-on all the way through, but they contribute.
• work across multiple systems, services or projects. In my mind the job of the architect is to try to optimise the value delivered across a portfolio of systems/projects. We're very good (mostly) at getting people to make local optimisations within system designs: we're not so good at balancing these with global optimisations that seek to pull IT activities closer to business strategy and direction.

The IASA is working to install more rigour into industry thinking and discussion of the "architect" role, and the Open Group has introduced an IT Architect Certification programme. Defining "architect" and "architecture" (in the context of IT) is a hot topic.

What do you think? Is this a valid distinction? Is anyone else out there seeing lots of re-branded analysts, or is it just me?