I had an interesting request from an architect today which was in the area of skills and competencies. He asked:

 

“Is there internal information regarding job descriptions, goals, objectives, key competencies etc that Microsoft have for the role of a technical or enterprise focussed architect that could be shared?”

 

Clearly (as he pointed out) they will depend on the organisation etc but there are some general competencies and skills that could be defined. Anyway we do have some of this information for architectural roles in Microsoft so I was thinking about pulling that together for this architect. The question I have is would this information be of interest to other architects? if so I could put it up on an external web site.

 

The other thing he asked was if we had an architect shadowing / mentoring program (which I guess would be a sort of hands on blog!). This was an interesting idea but most of our architectural work is done for customers so is confidential or for Microsoft and so is done in our ITG group in the US. Anyway I guess a blog is a sort of on line asynchronous mentoring program, in fact I wonder if there is anything substantive that a mentoring gives over and above a well written blog.

 

Yet again I am reminded of how much we need training and educational architectural material. I will send off another batch of emails trying to make this happen.