What makes a good IT Architect

Looking on the The Pragmatic Architect blog the thread on what makes a good architect brought back some interesting memories of the conversations I have had in the past on the subject.

From my experiences the answer is that anyone can be an architect because the term is used in IT to mean almost any job that is carried out….I am sure that developers (who were called programmers) will soon be called code architects.

You therefore need to qualify the term before you can describe what one is in IT. Most of the architects discussed in the Pragmatic Architecture thread are what I would term Solution Architects (in my definition these are the people who are responsible for making sure that the whole solution is effective end-to-end). The architecture types include Enterprise, Application, Functional, Data…..basically the list goes on and on……….

The key to me about a good architect (what ever the specialisation) is that they are able to think of requirements at a conceptual level first and then drive to a solutions – i.e they don’t just churn out the same design over and over again. This is what makes Normal Foster a great architect – would you make a building look like a huge phallus. Along side these architects you need good designers, structural engineers and site managers (we don’t have good words in IT for these yet) and in my opinion most “IT Architects” fall in to this category…..and a good job too as a world full for truly good architects would achieve nothing….