Who needs an architect?
Tuesday 22 November 2005 @ 11:14 am
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Who needs an architect? I came across this rather old article while I was searching for certifications that will lift my career, or the careers of my colleagues, into unexpected dimensions. We all know the Sun enterprise architect certification. We all also know the certification is nice as a piece of paper, a line in your curriculum, a commercial oriented added value but do we know the real value of such a certification? Does SCEA really take your career to the next level? The Sun variant is a vendor independent but technology driven approach to call yourself an architect. I was wondering, what other variants are there? And how do they compete or comply with SCEA?

Well, on one hand you can certify till the end of time, on the other hand finding a descent program seems to be a hell of a job. Every enterprise vendor has its own enterprise certification trail. Look at BEA, IBM and even JBoss. But what are these papers actually worth? And when going vendor, technology and even methodology independent, is it still possible to get you officially branded as an architect? My little research journey found exactly one organization that can act as a tattoo shop to get your certification logo’s : The OpenGroup, an ‘independent’ company running the Open Group IT Architect Program. This PDF describes how they think an architect should be skilled.

Back to the article. Let me quote a quote from the article: In most successful software projects, the expert developers working on that project have a shared understanding of the system design. This shared understanding is called ‘architecture’. and compare it with the OpenGroup definition: IT Architects develop architectures: the definition of the structures of an IT solution to a business problem. Is it me or can we call this slight difference of interpretation a gap?

Let’s map both definitions to SCEA: This certification is for enterprise architects responsible for architecting and designing Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology compliant applications, which are scalable, flexible and highly secure. I’m getting twisted. The shared understanding of system design, that has to meet certain criteria like being scalable (hey, my app will be used by only 10 designated users?), flexible (hey, may app is write once, run once, never touch it again?) and secure (hey, my app is for everyone, and I mean really everyone, who has spend time wasting energy to find my app?) needs to be defined in structures that solve a certain business problem! If this is the case, I’m out of it.

But still, the urge to re-dimension my career by certification is left unfilled. How do I become an architect who’s existence is not (explicitly) needed but who’s authority is branded in a simple shift of a t-shirts position showing an ugly painted tattoo telling yep this is an architect, look at the picture on his shoulder, who can help others solving problems by drawing (and setting-up/building in corporation with other expert developers!) the fundamentals of a solution? The OpenGroup approach gives a hint. Instead of way to many stupid multiple choice questions that need to be answered in order to get certified, their program is focused on proven experience and activities from the past. So, you can send them your track record, go through the process of certification, get weighted by all kind of committees, and become an architect. If they could only change their definition to get in line with Martin Fowlers article …..

So here’s what I did. On my left arm tattoo-bob has painted some nice looking tribals that are an Hawaiian translation of the definition of architecture, on my right arm tattoo-bob has painted every major vendor logo I could find and on my back tattoo-bob has written my curriculum. And whenever someone asks for my certifications, I take off my clothes and show them my ink. And if someone is asking which organization is behind my certification, all I have to do is point them to tattoo-bob!

— By Okke van 't Verlaat   Comments (14)   PermaLink

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