The incredibles

Ten years ago when I moved from small department IT into the world of corporate IT I heard for the first time the use of the word Architect in reference to someone working in the IT world. There was one person in the organisation that held that title, and he sat on the IS management team.

Recently I started a short period of work with a company that is at roughly the same stage of maturity as we were then but this time everybody is an Architect. There are Enterprise Architects, Technical Architects, Solutions Architects and so on going almost all the way down to calling the cha lady a beverages Architect. The truth is this is common in all companies anyone who is anyone is called an Architect.

Now leaving aside the fact that in the UK it is actually illegal to call yourself an Architect if you are not a member of the RIBA, this situation put me in mind of a film I watched recently. The Incredibles is about a superhero family in hiding, and it’s great. The thought it triggered was that in the film the bad guy wants to give everybody technology so that they can all be super heroes. His point is “When everyone is special then no one will be”.

I wonder if this is the case for the title Architect, and I wonder if this in itself makes it more difficult for us to achieve gravitas in the eyes of business units. If you look at the engineering world then being an engineer or a senior engineer is good. In fact many engineers do most of what Architects do yet they are proud to not be architects.

It seems to me that the separation should be between roles that think about how things should be done and roles that actually get things done.