Architects are Right-Brain Thinkers
In the recent Garner report “Ten Criteria for Choosing an External Service Provider for Your EA Effort", 3 of the 10 criteria related directly to the architects from the External Service Provider (ESP):
6.5 Does the ESP Have a Standard Approach for Identifying and Developing Architects Within Its Pool of Consultants?
6.6 Does the ESP Have a Standard Way of Describing Architects' Levels of Competence?
6.7 Does the ESP Have a Consistent Way of Staffing the Right Architect With the Right Skills on the Right Project?
Gartner is quite right to include these in their criteria. No issue has nagged the Architecture profession in general and the Enterprise Architecture discipline in particular as the challenge of identifying and developing architects.
I’ve often said that we play a cruel joke on most architects at some point in their career. Since most architects start as developers they spend years learning to take large problems and efficiently break them down into smaller and smaller pieces until finally they get to a level of detail that they can readily translate into code. Then after having proved their analysis skills sufficiently they are promoted to architect and told to do everything they used to do except backwards.
The programmer’s skill is analysis, but the core architect’s skill is synthesis. This is not to say that architecture doesn’t require a great deal of analysis, but the critical step in architecture is often re-assembling the pieces into new higher-level constructs in order to get to that which is “architecturally significant”. This is synthesis.
In his book “A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers will Rule the Future” Daniel Pink points out that analysis is a left-brain-directed skill, but synthesis is a right-brain-directed skill.
