Ted Neward, over on the Architecture Blog, has an excellent post on this very subject, Hard Questions on Architects. In it, an email writer queries whether or not architects should be facilitative or restrictive. Like all good architects, Ted answers with an equivocal "both."

One of the major salient points that Ted makes is that a "good architecture should enable developers to build applications quickly and easily, without having to spend significant amounts of time re-inventing similar infrastructure across multiple projects." This is pretty much a standard look at the "facilitative" aspect.

On the restrictive side, he says "an architecture ... should channel software developers in a direction that leads to all of these successes, and away from potential decisions that would lead to prolems later." I read this to mean that one of the many roles that an architect plays is that of mentor. In most cases, and as I've discussed before, architects should be leaders first. One of the many rules of leadership is to lead by influence rather than by dictate (although the latter is sometimes also needed). It's this lost art of leadership that architects need to know in order to work on software - both the human and electronic kind.

I wonder how many of you have run into architects with the "alpha-geek complex" Ted mentions? We usually just call them bit-twiddlers or rotorheads, and ignore them. But they're out there, beware.