"What is implicit in the SA role is that the rest of the dev team is full of dummies that can't think strategically or architect big parts of the system." The

"What is implicit in the SA role is that the rest of the dev team is full of dummies that can't think strategically or architect big parts of the system." The IQ of a team is equal to the IQ of its dullest member divided by the number of members. Ergo the only way to have good systems architecture is for a handful of smart people to do it. These people are the architects. The development of the IBM System/360 is a famous example of why this matters. They first tried to design the system by having a few hundred decent engineers do it in distributed fashion. The resulting design was so poor it had to be thrown away. The second try had a small team of architects plan the system while everybody else sat on their hands. It worked spectacularly well. P.S. If you think this does not apply to you, there is a good chance you have delegated a lot of your system architecture to small outside teams. You do not need your own data access architect if you are using, say, PostgreSQL.