I post this as a reply to Koz's "Why ‘Enterprise’ Development is Hard” blog post.

A large part of our customers come to us because they don't want to go through their own IT service. Usually they need a solution quickly and doing it internally takes too long and is much too rigid.

Over the years we learned that after listening to the customer's stories, we almost never do exactly what they initially wanted. We work from the business requirements first and the mandatory back-end restrictions. What they already designed is taken with a big grain of salt and we investigate if the solution that they came up with is effectively the best approach. Very often we're able to propose a simpler approach that's easier to implement, easier to use and easier to integrate. It's part of our job to be able to gently say 'no' and use our experience to really solve the requirements properly without bloating the result. Many people in the internal IT teams don't really take the trouble, they are often aversive to any kind of change and execute what they've been told or architect it exactly in the same way as what has already applied before. Most of the time they don't have the luxury to take time to learn about new technologies and tools. There is nothing wrong with that, but we think it's our responsibility to do better.

People trust an architect to figure out the best approach to build their house. We noticed that many customers are ready to give you the same trust if you have some track-record and are sure of yourself. Indeed it's not always easy to counter the internal techies and come up for what you consider better.