Solution Architecture is a grossly misused term now a days, it is a term that has been conviently violated for variety of reasons and feel good factors.Wikipedia says "Solutions Architect is a very experienced architect with cross-domain, cross-functional and cross-industry expertise]Various sites indicates Solution Architect is supposed to know all the technologies, all the software development methodologies, all hardware etc and participate in the team from Analysis, Design, Development, Testing and Production implementation. This is a uphill task for a human being to perform (barring few superbrain individuals).
If we relax our boundaries and think beyond the realms of IT and tweak our definition of Solution Architect, Solution Architect is a person who helps to realize big dreams.
This requires turning back the history to its earlier pages, the first ever tool that a man built was using stones which helped solve problems of hunting , subsequent splitting of the meat and attacking one another , of course. This was a rudimentary problem to solve and a giant leap forward was the innovation of wheel. Though the invention of wheel has not been attributed to any particular individual, the wide belief is that it was invented by 5th millenium BC in mesopatomia (ironically the current iraq) , it reached europe by 4th millenum BC and to Indus valley by 3rd millenium BC. This was the mother of all inventions and the person(s) who invented the wheel must be accredited the title of best solution architect. It not only made the society proceed faster in a alarming pace, but also paved way to variety of other inventions like forging , mining etc.
Rushing forward the history pages and narrowing our scope to IT, there are two types of solution architects that we could see, a class of people who could intelligently solve the problem in hand and a class of people who could innovate and find newer ways of doing things. Bill Gates belong to the earlier class, where he identified a gap and improvised the way things were done earlier. Steve Jobs would belong to the second category where he (we should include woz here) innovates newer way of doing(listening?) things.
So lets appreciate our first ever solution architect who invented the wheel, whose name was not recorded in the history, my harddisk keeps making humming noise and reminds me that its overworked, let me search that first solution architect in my dreams while his/her offsprings in present day iraq are busy killing and getting killed.
Long live solution architecting.....
