I thought the word "architect" came from the word "arch", not "chief". As in, someone who understands the once arcane and guild-restricted knowledge of the arch. The arch allows us to build vast buildings using a fraction of the amount of stone required without arches. It was held a secret within societies of masons for centuries.

The idea from this is that architects must know all about "best practices" and have the widest range of techniques available. You will rarely make a graduate programmer be the system architect.

Architects sit logically above everyone else, and they direct their work, but not in a management way - in a regulatory way. The *plans* they produce direct the work, but the architect need not spend much time on the building site, micromanaging people. Architects are policy setters.

Policy *must* be set in IT because it is embodied in the infrastructure (networks and machines, or classes and libraries). Every time a programmer chooses STL or a network manager chooses 1000BaseT, an architecture decision has been made, and cannot easily be reversed. If we are indeed in the middle of a technological revolution then mitigating factors can be introduced. That's still architecture. You don't stop making decisions now just because things might change in 5 years.

So of course we need people to make these decisions, and they must be made well. What is not clear is whether or not that is a full role requiring a whole person, or whether it is done by the "workers" wearing different hats on occasion. This is the political aspect to architecture, the part that means people may walk the other way when they see "the architect" approaching.

So "do we need architecture?" is a stupid question. Yes we do. And the people responsible should *know* they are doing architecture when they are doing it.

"Do we need architects?" is a political question, similar in kind to "do we need mailboys?". There is no single right answer for every situation. It depends how much mail there is to deliver.