>I think the definition of architecture should be a dev team effort with the architect role making the final decision (be that lead dev, CTO, whatever job title for that person).
I find the quality of decisions made by a single person in this role are never as good as decisions made by team consensus.
Architecting is by its nature a job that often requires subtle and delicate trade offs, and the more you concentrate the role in one person, the less experience you have to draw upon to make those trade offs.
I find that giving somebody authority to make the final call when there is still team disagreement is something of a false economy, too. The whole idea that discussion should be minimized for 'cost reasons' is how a lot of fantastically expensive bad decisions get made.
Yes but the reality of decisions is that one person needs to drive that decision - a group of people will often struggle to make a clear decision every time
I've had "architect" in my job title for ~15 years and I'm very clear that my job is not to make the key technical decisions, but to facilitate the process for making these decisions.
Agreed. An architect should be a knowledgeable generalist able to facilitate the discussion. Personally I'd hate to be the "smartest guy" in the team about anything.
However I spend a large part of my work days collaborating with all different stakeholders and different subsystem vendors and what I as an architect bring to the table is the requirements based on the context of the subsystem we work on. Rest of my days I design, code and debug just like the rest of the team.
I find the quality of decisions made by a single person in this role are never as good as decisions made by team consensus.
Architecting is by its nature a job that often requires subtle and delicate trade offs, and the more you concentrate the role in one person, the less experience you have to draw upon to make those trade offs.
I find that giving somebody authority to make the final call when there is still team disagreement is something of a false economy, too. The whole idea that discussion should be minimized for 'cost reasons' is how a lot of fantastically expensive bad decisions get made.