On the Role of Information Technology Systems Architects

Information Systems in large organizations are seldom built from scratch. They have to be built taking into account different existing aspects like customers, organization’s business, and its current Information Technology (IT) infrastructure, among others. IT architects are the professionals who take all these aspects into account when designing an information system. Despite their importance, the work of these professionals is barely understood. This research aims to fill this gap by describing a qualitative study we conducted with IT architects. We use semi-structured interviews for data collection and analyzed our data using grounded theory methods. Our results suggest that there are different IT architect roles in every company and that the activities performed by them are highly interconnected and these interconnections are fundamental for the information diffusion and collaboration in projects