The IT industry tends to bandy around a number of different architect roles. Working with different clients, as I do, I find there is often confusion about what all these roles do. I find the following diagram helps to explain the different roles that IT architects take. Of course the important point to emphasise is that these are roles not job titles. In other words, one person may take on multiple roles on any given project so this is not meant to be a a way of generating architecture jobs but is merely a way of showing the different skill areas or disciplines that need to be applied when building a solution that is comprised of multiple layers.