Type of Architects

Traditionally, our team has divided architects into three categories: Strategic, Application and Infrastructure. Gurpreet Pall, of MSA Enterprise Data Center fame and the new head of our Architecture Strategy team, suggested a different categorization scheme: Component, System and System-of-Systems. I like this scheme because it is more hierarchical where the scopes of strategic, application and infrastructure architects have small intersections.

Gurpeet’s scheme is also interesting in that component architects of system-of-systems architects don’t typically have much to talk about. Component architecture is below the abstraction layer for system-of-systems architects.

I’m not suggesting one view is better than the other, they are both interesting views into the same space. However, I’d like a better term than “system-of-systems architect”.

This entry was posted by DevHawk on January 22, 2004. It was posted in Architecture.

Comments:

How about meta-systems architects?
This comment was posted by David Williams on January 23, 2004 at 3:25 AM.
I use 'enterprise architect' to represent this scale of architecture. So the full range becomes: - component - system - enterprise HTH, Rand
This comment was posted by Rand Anderson on January 23, 2004 at 11:59 AM.
I think Rand is onto something. +1 Your post inspired me to think a lot about the behavioral patterns of our architects in addition to their titles and tasks. I wrote up a little piece based on observations of our team: http://www.cerkit.com/cerkitBlog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=e0b5eb55-efb5-4748-9cb1-0ff8f3170fc2 Thanks for the inspiration.
This comment was posted by Michael Earls on February 05, 2004 at 5:58 AM.

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