I had a conversation recently with someone running a small restaurant chain. Three locations. A loyalty system that does not talk to her inventory, a scheduling app that emails PDFs, and a POS platform she chose because the vendor had a good pitch and a free trial. Last year she overordered on two locations during a slow month because nothing was connected to anything else and nobody was watching the whole picture. She has never once been in the same room as a trained architect.
Then I drove past a police department in my small Spanish town. The school district. A local healthcare clinic. A family-run distribution company with twelve trucks and forty employees. All of them are running more software than they did five years ago. All of them making critical technology decisions based on whoever was cheapest or loudest. None of them with access to someone who actually knows how to think through a system.
A recent Goldman Sachs survey found that 42% of small businesses do not have access to the resources and expertise necessary to successfully deploy the technology they are already trying to use. That is not a small number. That is almost half the economy. The US Chamber of Commerce reports that nearly all small businesses are now using at least one technology platform, with 96% planning to adopt new technologies including AI. They are already deep into territory they do not have the skills to navigate.
And where are the architects? Mostly chasing the Fortune 500. Competing for a seat in the enterprise. Arguing with IT managers and developers that they are valuable.
Mostly they are fighting over the same small pool of large contracts where half the value has already been absorbed by the consulting brand that introduced them to the client. And they are being told to build and design things poorly. I’ve listened to you talk. And you are NOT happy with the state of architecture.
Consulting and big business built an entire profession around the assumption that only large organizations could afford us or needed us. That assumption was never true but is even less true now. It was just where the money seemed to be concentrated and where the role was first defined. The enterprise was not even the birthplace of architecture. It was just the only organization with the budget to name and pay for it. The thinking was there long before the job title. Master builders did not work exclusively for kings. They worked wherever something complex needed to be built well.
Here is what the BTABoK has always understood and what we rarely say loudly enough. A trained architect is not an add-on for organizations that already have a change manager, a product owner, a lead developer, and a delivery team. That model only works in the enterprise. And it isn’t working well. The role confusion, the mixed management messages, the politics and the dynamics of speed and cost over quality do not lend themselves to making valuable and beautiful things.
For those of you looking for where the job growth will be when the big companies ‘fire’ you for cheaper AI companions (ah, the image of a manager with a sychophantic AI staff and no one else makes me smile), this is where I believe thousands of real architects will be needed.
The reason a certified architect is the right person for the restaurant chain, the school district, and the police department is precisely because those organizations cannot afford five specialists. They need one person who can see the business as a whole. Who understands what the vendors are actually selling. Who can direct a contractor without losing the thread of why it matters. Who can make a principled decision about integration and data and platform choice and still walk back into the dining room and explain to the owner why it matters to her margins. Who can dive in and solve deeply technical issues with for them extremely big consequences. They need to be skilled. They need to be ethical. They need to be affordable. That is not a scaled-down version of some half-baked management theory consultants and speakers call architecture. That is architecture doing what it was always meant to do. Building beautiful things that matter to people and business in ways they cannot do themselves. Thats why I started. I bet it is why you started as well.
Approximately 98% of all companies in markets like Canada qualify as small and medium businesses, employing the majority of the working population. These organizations are not a niche. They are the default. The enterprise has always been the exception. This is as big in Europe. With the movement of Gen Z AWAY from big business and the movement of people AWAY from big tech, it has growing momentum.
This was a vision I always wanted for us. How many real architects do the businesses in your town NEED (even if they may not know it yet). That’s how doctors, lawyers and building architects work. Locally. Naturally. Towards outcomes you can actually feel.
The BTABoK gives contract architects everything needed to serve this market well. The solution architecture practice, the engagement model, the canvases, the lifecycle tools. What does not scale down easily is the attitude that a small engagement is beneath us. That is the narrative that needs to change.
If you are thinking about independent or contract work, a few things in the BTABoK are directly relevant. First I am dedicated to helping this market succeed. Im very interested in your thoughts about the tools we will need to make it happen (job boards? contract lists? local outreach materials?)
The btabok itself is shaped around this. The Architecture Lifecycle is the flexible engagement model a solo practitioner needs when the client has no internal practice to plug into. The Solution Architecture specialization give the principled framework for decisions that are right-sized and traceable. And the career path materials make the case for why an independently credentialed architect, carrying CITA and grounded in the BTABoK, has something genuinely differentiating to offer a client who has never heard the word architecture used in a technology context before.
That client is everywhere. They are your neighbors. They are the businesses you walk past every day. They are making consequential technology decisions right now without anyone in the room who knows what they are doing.
Bigger is not better. Better is better. The cathedrals that last are not always the largest ones.
https://blog.workday.com/en-us/top-4-small-business-technology-trends-in-2024.html