The Software Architect Elevator

Foreword by David Knott

I remember the first time I was asked to form an architecture team within an IT function. I didn’t know what it meant, but thought it sounded cool, and was confident that I could figure it out. That confidence lasted about five minutes, until a team member asked whether we were going to be technology architects or enterprise architects, and I realized that I didn’t know the difference!

Twenty years later, I am privileged to be chief architect of a global organization, and although I still haven’t found a perfect job description for architects, I have learned that being comfortable with ambiguity is one of the most important attributes of a good architect—asking awkward questions, as my team member illustrated, being another!

This book will help you understand what being an architect is like by painting a vivid picture of an architect’s life and mission in the current phase of the information technology revolution. Riding the architecture elevator is how my team and I spend our time: racing from one part of our organization to another, connecting, explaining, questioning, and trying to make good decisions about complex systems with imperfect information. The elevator takes us from code to business strategy and back again, all within the same day.

Architecture has been intermittently in and out of fashion within enterprise technology, and architects are sometimes accused of “not making anything.” I believe that architects make two things that are of vital ...