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How do you review a Solutions Architect?

By Anup S • August 12, 2008 • Filed in: Design, Reviews

We were pointed out many times that our application can be used to do employee reviews. We pretended that this was the first time we heard such a great idea. For god’s sake, for the last time, we will repeat this again - ReviewScale can be used to create review forms. These forms can be used to review or rate anything or anyone.

Anyways, back to the real reason for posting this topic. Our Solutions Architect in our company is an amazing individual with many phenomenal talents. Since he is the co-founder of the company, we didn’t hire him, he hired himself. But recently we decided that we wanted one more person like him and then we hit the problem : What are we exactly looking for in a Solutions Architect ?. Our good old Solutions Architect answered this question for us.

A Solutions architect should understand his goal :

Goal

- A commitment to provide the best possible customer experience throughout a solution delivery process

He / she should have the following skills

Leadership

  • Leadership in thought
  • Leadership in forecasting problem areas
  • Influencing decisions
  • Mentorship
Communication

  • Navigate politically charged organizational landscapes
  • Effectively mediate and manage conflict.
  • Build relationships with other architects and project stakeholders
  • Understanding legal guidelines and comply with them

Strategy


  • Understands the business strategy of your organization and articulate that to the technology team.
  • Balance the needs of users, management, operations, support, finance, and technology with the strategic needs of the business, including business benefits and vendor pricing implications.
  • Understand technology trends and see how current architecture can evolve if needed to meet the trends
  • Use enterprise frameworks for mapping business architecture to technology architecture
  • Understand operational frameworks.


Technology Breadth


  • Interacting with data architects and infrastructure architects to produce a end to end solution
  • Understanding architectural attributes and issues around them scalability, maintainability, security, reliability, extensibility, flexibility, availability, and manageability.
  • Think abstractly and modeling for different views.
  • Effectively adapt solutions to the capabilities and constraints of the infrastructure.
  • Have a broad architectural knowledge of several technology areas and be able to compare and contrast multiple vendor offerings in those areas.
  • Learn new concepts and gain expertise quickly.


Technology Depth


  • Candidates also demonstrate the ability to quickly assimilate information about new technologies. Examples of competencies include, but are not limited to, the following:
  • Solutions frameworks such as the Microsoft .NET Framework and Java 2 Platform, or Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE).
  • Integration, as evidenced by knowledge of traditional enterprise application integration (EAI) products such as Microsoft BizTalk Server, IBM WebSphere, or BEA WebLogic.
  • User experience modelling with prototypes and other tools
  • Data structuring and management.



Ideally all these areas can be brought up in different interview questions. So when you design a review form, you should cover as many areas here.

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