There is a funny distinction people make about I am an IT professional versus business professional. This is good as far we are talking about what type of skills I have. However it is essential in a successful organization to have a realization that we all working towards solving business problems. I cannot be a purely IT professional and just focus on IT problems. The way I would look at it is I am helping solve a business problem using my IT skills. This takes be back the fundamental reason of existence in any organization. The moment we focus on the reason of our existence in an organization that we are here to solve a business problem or achieve a business goal, our perspective changes. We all become business professionals. Of course we will use different skills to contribute towards solving a problem or achieving a goal, but it is very important to start from a business reason.
As an architect, when I am asked to design a software system I start from what are the organizations goals, what are they trying to accomplish, what business problem are we solving and then understand the solution architecture. In some projects I have seen that an architect is given a bunch of requirement documents and functional specifications and asked to create software architecture. I believe architect should be involved during the requirement gathering discussions and functional specification formation process as well along with business users and business analysts. Architect may not play active role there, but it is important for that role to be part of the process, interact with business users and business analysts to hear the information first hand and not from some document. Architecture is built using collaboration with various parties and a document has limitations of how much you can capture in it.
