Call yourself an architect?
At last year’s inaugural Architect Insight Conference Martin Fowler and I found time to violently agree with each other that the whole analogy between IT and civil engineering was spurious, misleading and based on a failure to understood the very different risk profiles between building a bridge and designing a piece of software.
In a nutshell, “real” architects have a clearly defined role to minimise the otherwise immense risks that would arise during the build phase. That’s why garden sheds are designed not architected. Software doesn’t have a similar high-risk build phase – it has a design phase and a compile stage, the latter being automated and relatively trivial because all the risk is in the quality of the design, not the quality of the compilation. So there’s a good argument for saying that everyone from junior developers upwards are more analogous to architects than they are to brickies.
Having said that, there are important similarities between civil engineering architects and technology architects. We both convert our clients’ wishes into solutions, we are both measured in part on the aesthetics, durability and fitness for purpose of our designs, we both value independence of mind and we are both called to account for the expense and value of our creations.
But that’s not why we call ourselves architects. We do it to create a little prestige and to distinguish ourselves from others that we view as either less qualified or differently qualified. And we have been successful to the point where everyone now wants to be called an architect. There are even job adverts for information architects and migration architects, with job descriptions seemingly lacking any significant architectural component.
The Architects Act of 1997 strictly forbids anyone not registered under the act from practicing or carrying on business using the word “architect”. The effect is somewhat spoiled by the next clause which exempts naval, landscape and golf-course architects, but the wish to reserve the word for a special sort of practitioner is clear. As computing struggles on its journey from wild west frontier to learned profession, perhaps we should be following the example set by our near-namesakes and protect our job title.
So, Essence of Architect – can we define it, and can we test for it? If so, we have a profession and a set of entry criteria. If not, we’ve got an inflated job title that can be adopted by everyone who fancies it. That’s why this year’s Architects Insight focus groups are examining the various architect roles in IT. The ultimate aims of running the focus groups are to:
- Introduce consistency in job titles for architects in technology roles.
- Limit “job title inflation” where anyone capable of any design activity is in danger of being labelled an architect.
- Better differentiate architecture roles from other senior technology roles such as Technical Consultant and Software Engineer.
- Further the professionalisation of the top of the IT professions.
- Better understand what attributes mark out an IT professional as being suited to an architecture role.
- Assess the appropriateness of various qualification criteria to safeguard the professional standing of IT architects.
Mike Lloyd
Managing director, Carbonflame
