The Return of the Generalist Architect
Historically, many organisations in NZ engaged architects at the wrong time, focusing on delivering specific solutions without considering broader business needs. This has over time diminished the value an architect brings. Often the decision is to generally go with an upgrade of the current solution (e.g. SAP upgrade), rather than taking a holistic approach and understanding what is best for the business, it’s about going with what works and has done over a long period of time.
This has led to a proportion of the architecture market becoming very one dimensional and segmented around products. I have seen many architects who are specialists in one product, but don’t necessarily have more rounded architecture experience. I am not disparaging people having a specific area of knowledge and absolutely nailing it, infact I think it is a great thing to do. You should become a master of your craft and you will have a bright future, so long as the area you operate in stays bouyant. However in the broader context, what has ended up happening is that organisations no longer wanted the rounded SA, who could turn their hand to many things. They want a specialist (Azure Architect / AWS Architect / SAP Architect). A knock-on effect has been that some rounded architects ended up specialising because that is where the has been.
What we have now is a market that is more specialist than it is generalist. Why I find this interesting is that with the growing maturity of the architecture space in NZ, organisations are now (finally) starting to see the benefits of business architecture and a capability led approach. This has caused organisations to start to think more strategically about their transformation programmes. Rather than just go with SAP because it’s tried and tested, the business wants to go out to market to see what solution best fits their business.
Architects are now getting brought into the conversation a lot earlier, which is exactly where it should be. Rather than a decision being made and the architect coming in to do the implementation, they are getting engaged from the start, getting asked to understand the organisation’s capabilities and take them through the vendor selection process. At a point, yes, a specialist will be required, but the generalist is often still there to keep them in line with the overarching strategy.
I absolutely love this approach; I think it’s a great thing for NZ and will really benefit organisations in the long run. What this means though, is that NZ is now in desperate need of generalists. The number of organisations I am working with who have asked me to find them a cloud architect who has surface level knowledge across multiple cloud products is growing by the day.
If you are a generalist architect, there is a good future for you. You don’t necessarily have to go down one route or another, you can remain a generalist and offer advice across an array of initiatives.