Software teams that are smaller and/or agile tend to be staffed with people that are generalised specialists; people that have a core specialism along with more general knowledge and experience. In an ideal world, these cross-discipline team members would work together to run and deliver a software project, undertaking everything from requirements capture and architecture through to coding and deployment. Although many software teams strive to be self-organising, in the real world they tend to be larger, more chaotic and staffed only with specialists. These teams, therefore, tend to need and have somebody in a technical leadership role.
There are a lot of people out there calling themselves "solution architects" or "technical architects" (particularly in larger organisations) who define a software architecture and then throw their solutions over the wall to a separate design and development team. What's worse is that often nobody takes ownership of the architecture, and the original architect takes only a cursory glimpse at the progress from time to time.
