Becoming an Architect in a System Integrator

So inspired by Amit Unde after reading this article.

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Being an architect is tough! What architects do is a mystery to much of the world; this is hardly surprising, because an architect's work is intangible—"thought-ware," if you will—and it happens in the background. That makes many wonder about the architect's role in an organization. Architects interact with many stakeholders—CIOs, project managers, business users, and developers—and each expects them to work differently. While the CIO expects an architect to derive a solution road map for implementing the company's IT vision, the developer expects the architect to provide direction on the technical problem. The architect needs to have a bird's-eye view in one scenario, while in some other scenarios, the architect needs to dive deep into the problem area. The architect is expected to be both a generalist and a specialist.

Many companies try to reduce the ambiguity by introducing different flavors of the role, such as enterprise architect or solution architect. Ironically, differentiation within the role can add to the confusion since there is no standardization of the designations across companies. Let's find the commonalities and define these different flavors of the role.

Read more here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/cc505970.aspx

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