First of all, wanted to say how much I enjoy your blog.

How about..when the buck stops with you?!

If you have the ultimate responsibility and accountability for technical decisions, then that has got to be a pretty good indicator.

It's a question of leadership, of sticking your neck out and being the person people turn to when pointy questions are asked such as:

• why is the peformance so bad?
• will we be OK if our business trebles? How confident are you of that?
• why does it take so long to add such a simple function?

These are the sorts of things that a lead developer would shy away from, or respond to with unintelligible or blame-shifting answers. Of course, a bad architect will be guilty of that as well.

The above doesn't always apply when you have architects parachuted in during the project inception and moving on to the next green field before the impact of their decisons are fully understood.

I honestly believe that an important part of being a architect is about hanging around long enough to understand the repercussions of your choices and learning from them. I don't care if you've had 20 3 month engagements across 15 different industries.

I think this is one reason why we suffer from lingering suspicion and cynicism around the word 'architect' and are still, in the year 2006, having conversations along the lines of 'so, what's an architect, *really*?'

Cheers,