Beware Architects

I was recently having a conversation about things to watch out for in the culture of engineering organizations and mentioned that alarm bells start ringing for me when architecture and architects enter the conversation. For anyone who knows me well this might be surprising as I’ve had the word architect in my title or job description in various organizations for the better part fo the last 20 years. Far too often systems/software architecture as practiced in organizations becomes a part of a bureaucratic immune system instead of an integral or foundational capability within a product or service delivery team. Martin Fowler wrote a well reasoned article on this topic for IEEE Software in 2003 ¹ and his points are all the more salient today as the industry has gone all in on commoditized open technologies offered at marginal costs by hyper scale cloud providers.