In my previous post “Architect Title vs Architect Role”, I wrote that it’s better to think architect role than architect title; an architect role is a part you play in a team when doing architecture work; the person who takes architecture title may does different job than architecture work.

But what is architecture work?

Architecture work mainly focuses on the definition and description of main components of the target system (system) and the relationship (or interface) between system and system context (business context and information infrastructure); the relationship between system and external systems and the relationship among components inside the system.

There are more content in the definition of architecture work based on different understanding. Unfortunately, there is no a standard definition right now. However, the basic architecture work should mainly contain analysis and design.

In software development domain, architecture work may contain basic coding work, but the purpose of the coding is mainly for the creation of PoC system (Prove of Concept).

Depends on the domains the architecture works belong to, we can define different architecture work: enterprise architecture (for several systems in an organization- a company or a department or a team) work, solution architecture (for an specific system or project) work, system architecture (focus on hardware and networks) work. However, no matter how differences they are, the basic should be same: Analysis and design!