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Why The Software Architect Role is Vital in Organizations
Posted 22 January 2025
Written by Mark Richards
Why do so many software systems fail to meet the goals and expectations of the business? One reason is that many software systems lack proper alignment with other facets of the organisation’s technical and business environment.
In this article you’ll learn how a system must be aligned with various aspects of the business and technical environment to ensure its success, and how the role a software architect plays a vital part in ensuring that alignment.

Introduction
Every office building has an architecture that defines the structure of the building. Similarly, every software system has an architecture that defines a structure of that system. Both an office building and a software system require a sound structure to make it successful. Without a proper architecture the office building (as well as the software system) would come crumbling to the ground.
This common and popular metaphor for software architecture starts to fall apart quickly because software architecture, unlike a building’s architecture, is meant to be malleable. A software architecture meant to change frequently and adapt, evolve, and reshape itself to new requirements, technical change, and business change. Without a software architect at the helm, a software system would not be able to change as the business or technology changes.
Business and technology change are not the only things a software architect needs to be concerned about. A software architect must also assure that the architecture of a system is properly aligned with other influential facets of the business and technical environment. Without proper alignment, a software system is very likely not to achieve its desired goals.
This article describes the important intersections of architecture and other aspects of the business that a software architect must keep in constant alignment to ensuring the success of any software system. A follow-on article will describe the governance techniques a software architect can leverage to ensure these alignments.
The Eight Intersections of Software Architecture
To create a sound and successful software architecture, an architect first analyzes the business goals and concerns, then translates those business goals into architectural characteristics (commonly referred to a non-functional requirements). Using these architectural characteristics, the software architect then selects the most appropriate architectural style for the problem at hand.
This is a good starting point and a solid approach to a successful architecture. However, for an architecture to work, it must also be aligned with other facets of the technical and business environment. These alignments are called the intersections of architecture. These eight architectural intersections include Implementation, infrastructure, data topologies, engineering practices, team topologies, systems integration, the enterprise, and the business environment.

The following sections describe each of these intersections and explain why they are so vital to software architecture and the role of a software architect.
Architecture and Implementation
A common response from software architects when asked a question from a development team is “That’s an implementation detail.” All too often software architects ignore the critical intersection of architecture and implementation, resulting in an architecture that fails to achieve its business goals. For an architecture to work properly, its implementation–that is, its source code and the way it’s structured–must be aligned for it to work properly.
A system’s architecture—its structure—is represented through both a logical architecture and a physical architecture. A logical architecture is the system’s internal structure consisting of architectural components (building blocks) and the interactions between these components. A physical architecture represents the deployable artifacts of the system—services, databases, user interfaces, gateways, message brokers, and so on.
The logical architecture of a system is usually represented through the directory structures in the source-code repository (or namespaces, depending on the programming language), where higher-level directories represent domains and subdomains, and the leaf directories represent the logical components. Since the logical architecture describes the internal structure of the system and how the parts of the system interact with each other, it’s critical that the structure of the source code matches that of the logical architecture.
Without proper guidance, knowledge, and governance from a software architect, it’s easy for developers to ignore the system’s logical architecture and start creating directory structures and namespaces as they please, without regard for their impact on the system’s integrity. When the internal structure of a system gets misaligned with the logical architecture, teams find they struggle with maintenance, testing, deployments, overall reliability, adaptability, and evolvability of the system.
The same is true with the physical architecture. Service granularity (the size of a service) can significantly impact operational and maintenance aspects of the architecture, including scalability, elasticity, fault tolerance, availability, and agility—the ability to respond quickly to change.
It is critical for a software architect to ensure the alignment of the architecture with the implementation through constant communication and collaboration with the development team, coupled with strong automated governance. Without therole of an architect in place, systems can quickly become misaligned with the architecture, resulting in systems that fail to meet the goals or demands of the business.
Architecture and Infrastructure
Around the mid-2000s, the typical relationship between architecture and operations was contractual and formal, with lots of bureaucracy. Most companies outsourced operations to a third party to avoid the complexity of hosting their own operations. Today, however, architecture styles such as microservices leverage characteristics that used to be solely operational, requiring a tighter collaboration between architects and DevOps, even in cloud-based environments.
Many technologists during the dot-com boom remember the fateful story of Pets.com. This e-commerce site appeared around 1998, hoping to become the Amazon.com of pet supplies. Pets.com’s management apparently focused all their energy on brilliant marketing campaigns, largely ignoring infrastructure. Once orders started pouring in, they weren’t prepared. The website was slow, transactions were lost, and deliveries delayed, creating a worst-case scenario for the company. Shortly after a disastrous Christmas rush, Pets.com was forced to shut down its business for good.
The intersection of architecture and infrastructure is important because it’s vital to supporting the operational architectural characteristics of the system. Just because an architecture and its corresponding implementation can support high scalability doesn’t mean it will if the corresponding infrastructure doesn’t support it (as demonstrated by the Pets.com disaster).
Aligning architecture with infrastructure involves close communication and collaboration between architects and infrastructure team members, even adopting proper DevOps practices, so that all stakeholders understand the critical operational concerns. Only then can architects truly realize the operational benefits of the architecture they have in place, demonstrating again the vital role a software architect plays in the organization.
Architecture and Data Topologies
The intersection of architecture and data topologies is an often overlooked one. Choosing the wrong database type or topology can harm an architecture and negate its best architectural characteristics. For example, monolithic databases, while providing good data consistency and transactional support, can negatively impact scalability and fault tolerance. Similarly, distributed database topologies, while good at scalability and change control, can negatively impact a system’s data integrity, data consistency, and performance.
A database’s topology refers to how its physical databases are configured within the architecture. Does the system use a single monolithic database, or are the databases distributed by domain, or even by service? The type of database topology used can significantly impact the success of the architecture.
For example, microservices architectures typically use a database-per-service pattern to maintain a strict bounded context. Without this proper alignment, it would be extremely challenging for architects to control change, and the system’s operational characteristics, such as fault tolerance, scalability, elasticity, maintainability, testability, and deployment, would all suffer. Some architectural styles, such as service-based architecture, are more flexible and forgiving regarding the physical database topology but nevertheless must still be aligned to properly work.
A software architect must work in close concert with database experts to ensure that the database topology and database types are properly aligned with the architecture. Without a software architect in place, teams can easily diverge in terms of goals or objectives, resulting in a misaligned architecture that doesn’t work.
Architecture and Engineering Practices
Engineering practices are processes, tools, and techniques teams use to develop test, and release software. Extreme programming (XP), continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and test-driven development (TDD) are all examples of engineering practices.
The intersection between architecture and engineering practices is quickly becoming an increasing concern for most companies, particularly those embracing architectural styles such as microservices and event-driven architecture. Yesterday’s engineering practices that worked with large monolithic systems fail to work for highly distributed systems, and companies are finding it difficult to make these architectures work. It is the role of a software architect to analyze the existing engineering practices in place to ensure they match the corresponding software architecture.
A good example of this kind of alignment is the highly sought-after architectural characteristic agility. Agility is defined as the ability to respond quickly to change. Agility involves other architectural characteristics such as maintainability (the ease of applying software changes to the source code), testability (the ease of and completeness of testing), and deployability (the frequency, ceremony, and risk associated with releasing software).
Architectural styles such as microservices rate extremely high for agility from an architectural standpoint and assume that teams will automate things like machine provisioning, testing, and deployment. Trying to build a microservices architecture with an antiquated operations group, manual processes, and little testing would likely lead to failure, regardless of how well the architecture supports it.
Architecture and Team Topologies
Team topologies (the way development teams are structured and organized) can have a direct impact on software architecture, and vice versa. This alignment is often overlooked and can lead to struggles to accomplish even the simplest of tasks within a system.
One of the most basic alignments between team topologies and architecture is by the type of partitioning between each. Like architectural styles, teams can be domain-partitioned or technically partitioned. Domain-partitioned teams are organized by domain area and are typically cross-functional, with specialization throughout the team. For example, a particular domain-partitioned team might focus on the customer-facing portion of a system, and as such would be responsible for the end-to-end processing of customer-related functionality, from the UI to the database. Domain-partitioned teams align well with domain-partitioned architectures such as service-based architecture and microservices.
Technically partitioned teams, in contrast, focus on a specific technical function of the architecture and are usually organized by technical areas. For example, user interface teams, backend-processing teams, shared-services teams, and database teams would align with the layered architecture style (a technically partitioned architecture) very nicely.
Understanding how teams are organized is vital for ensuring the success of the system. If the organization’s team topology is misaligned with the architecture, the teams will struggle to implement and maintain the architecture, which will be unlikely to meet its business goals.
Architecture and Systems Integration
Systems rarely live in isolation. Most require additional processing and data from other systems, which in turn forms an intersection between architecture and systems integration. When one system needs to communicate with another system to perform additional processing or retrieve data, its architect faces a host of challenges and implications. For example, is the system that is being called available when its needed? Does it scale and perform to the same level as the requirements of the calling system?
Without the role of a software architect to focus on systems integration alignment, the systems’ static and dynamic coupling often results in architectures that can’t scale, aren’t responsive, and lack agility. When integrating with other systems, software architects must consider which communication protocols to use, what types of contracts to have between systems, whether the systems’ architectural characteristics are compatible.
Architecture and the Enterprise
Every enterprise has a set of standards and guiding principles. An enterprise is this regard is the collection of all systems and products within a company (or a department or division within the company). For example, many companies force certain security standards, practices, or procedures on architectural solutions, regardless of the type of system. Enterprise standards can also involve platforms, technologies, documentation standards, and diagramming standards, to name a few. Software architects must be aware of enterprise-level standards and practices, and ensure the architecture is properly aligned with them.
Architecture and the Business Environment
The business environment has a significant and direct influence on the architecture of its systems (and vice versa). Is the company undergoing severe cost-cutting measures to stay afloat, or aggressively expanding? Is the business pivoting and repositioning every quarter to find its niche in a highly volatile and competitive market, or does it find itself in a position of stability? An effective software architect understands the position and direction of the company and aligns the architectures of critical systems to match the business environment.
Another aspect of the intersection between architecture and business environment is domain-to-architecture isomorphism. This term refers to how close the “shape” of the architecture matches the “shape” of the business problem it’s trying to solve. For example, companies undergoing extreme cost-cutting measures would not align well with microservices or space-based architectures, which are very costly to create and maintain. Conversely, businesses that are aggressively expanding through mergers and acquisitions would not be served well by monolithic architecture styles that lack the ability to evolve and adapt.
Summary
Software architecture is a holistic activity that involves many facets of an organization. Effective software architects realize that creating and maintaining an architecture is much more than just selecting a particular architectural style and moving forward with implementation. It’s also about making sure that the architecture is aligned with other aspects of the environment and about using strong communication and collaboration skills to make that alignment happen. Without the role of a software architect, companies will struggle with these intersections and corresponding alignments, resulting in software systems that don’t achieve important business goals and needs.
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