I ran a couple of half-day training sessions yesterday, both of which were basically cut-down versions of the full 2-day Software Architecture for Developers training course. The major difference was that both of these sessions were for non-developers such as business analysts, project managers, testers and project management office staff. Given that many of these people do, or should, work closely with software architects, I asked them what their expectations of the software architecture role were. Here's what they said.
I think this is fascinating, especially because their definition of the role is better than I've seen from some developers! On the subject of whether software architects should be hands-on and write code, their response was "yes, it keeps their hand in". Brilliant. :-)