Practical Benefits of Architectural Views and Models

I have been assigned to lead a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) prototype effort for the organization I work for. Since this project involves building a SOA solution with canned data sources (the easy part) and then formulating best practices in SOA governance (the hard part), I have begun to appreciate the skillset of an architect. IT Architecture helps folks, who are in the architect role, to create artifacts which can communicate the core IT system architecture, process architecture, data architecture, etc., etc, to various audience groups. Creating conceptual models and logical models provides a great mechanism to communicate complex or abstract ideas in a straight forward manner. IT Architecture doesn't simply involve drawing pretty pictures in Visio and show-off your Visio skills but it is more than that. It is the ability to take a system design, complex design and simplifying it to a diagram which conveys the necessary details to its appropriate audience. Being an architecture enables you to improve your communication skills, able to adapt and communicate to various audience in appropriate terms in appropriate detail. It is important to know that even when you are simplifying a concept for a technically novice audience, you cannot compromise the underlying physical architecture of a system. The architect has to know the whole design but then he is astute enough to decipher what is needed and what is not needed when the design is communicated to the appropriate audience. Anyway today I can say that I managed to convince key stakeholders in the project on how the system should be designed. This was a big accomplishment in the project. For any aspiring architects, you will miss developing code, you will miss updating your spend plan but in the end you will be responsible for marketing the system, improving the system and most importanly, communicating the system to the appropriate audience.