Why would anyone want to be an Architect?

Architects weigh in on what makes their jobs cool.

In past issues of Oracle Magazine, this column has devoted a lot of attention to
how to become an architect and has shared the insight and expertise of
working architects as they discuss how they have developed and sharpened the
various skills necessary to thrive in that role. But this column has never
addressed one simple, straightforward question: Why would anyone want to be
an architect?

The architects I contacted for responses to that question—my informal team
of expert advisors—were attracted to the role because it requires a very
specific combination of highly developed technical skills, equally well-developed
people skills, and a keen ability to see and grasp the big picture, all wrapped up
in a desire to be an instrument of change.

Oracle ACE Director Lucas Jellema, solution
architect and CTO of AMIS Technologies,
describes the big-picture focus as both the
primary challenge and the greatest attraction
for the role. “The mix of competencies that is
required; the potential impact you have as an
architect; and the constant intellectual
challenge of abstract, high-level, long-term
strategic thinking one moment and very
operational, concrete, and detailed thinking
the next is what makes it fun. You are in
touch with so many people and so many aspects of the project and the
technology that it is hugely challenging and rewarding. Never a dull moment!”

The architect’s job is “problem-solving on a large scale, a struggle to align
people and technology to accomplish a mixture of goals,” says Randy Stafford,
architect-at-large for the Oracle Coherence product development team at
Oracle. “It’s gratifying work for someone with an analytical, engineering
mindset. Challenging, but stimulating and rewarding.”

Ronald van Luttikhuizen, managing partner at Vennster and an Oracle ACE
Director, also enjoys the problem-solving aspect of the role. “As an IT
architect you are in the unique position to have a real impact on the quality and
usefulness of solutions for the business,” he says. “It’s like solving puzzles, but
you still have the opportunity to get your hands dirty by helping in software
realization.”

The ability to balance that kind of day-to-day technical practicality with a
vision for the future sets architects apart.

“To be an architect is to think differently
from those around you, and to be able to
have a profound influence on the future
state of things,” says Clifford Musante,
lead architect with the Oracle Fusion
Middleware Architects team. “Architects
are required to simultaneously address the
multiple concerns of the business, the
users, the evolving state of technology, and
the continuous need for innovation and
lower costs, all while providing more-robust
and more-reliable solutions. For those who
can think coherently, completely, and across
multiple concerns simultaneously, what’s
not to love about a job like that?”

Oracle ACE Luis Weir, Oracle solutions
director at HCL AXON, describes the
architect’s role as fundamental to an IT
revolution that is only just getting started. “Information technology is to the
twenty-first century what the Industrial Revolution was to the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and twentieth centuries,” says Weir. “You become an architect
because you are passionate and you want your solutions to have a positive
impact on your business or society.”

As the last, lingering vestiges of the twentieth century fall away, it becomes
ever more obvious that the familiar mantra “every business is an IT business”
is expanding in scope with each passing second—as every home becomes an IT
home; every automobile becomes a rolling data center; and human beings, by
virtue of evolving mobile devices, wearable computers, and whatever comes
next in that astonishing progression, become ever more connected to each
other and to the world around them. How we make that journey, and where
that unpredictable path takes us, is the business of IT architects. Who
wouldn’t want to be a part of that?