Architect - Roles - expectations laymen view

From a business-centric perspective, architects should be corporate assets, not code designers. There are five dimensions to a software architect role: 1. technology 2. consulting 3. strategy 4. organizational politics 5. leadership Technology should consume perhaps less than 20% of an architect's day. Projects don't fail because of bad design or ugly code or improper/inefficient testing or even a wrong choice of technologies. There is no such thing as a perfect technology for a task at hand, only bad leaders and poor visionaries. The above mentioned are but consequences of poor organizational choices and a lack of focus. And patterns? They are but a convenient communication framework of the day. Should we know it as architects? Yes. At least we should know where the repositories are, and how to look through the repositories for a match with a task at hand

The scope of assessing an architect varies based on the role he/she is likely to play(Application/Domain Architect, Solutions architect and Enterprise architect). So mere asking some technical questions like final, finally and finalize will not help to select a good architect. Questions like the below one might be more practical: For an Application Architect : 1. Give a project requirement and ask him to depict the Application and System Architecture models then start ur question based on it... that will give a good idea. 2. All NFR questions.3. Design methodologies used, issues, solutions.4. Give a scenario ask them to design... - classdiagram, seq or deployment or component etc...5. Questions on design patterns6. Question on Team lead and peer interaction, presentations.
For a Solutions Architect: Questions about the project dependent items - like Infrasture team, security, development team - should be asked.
For an Enterprise Architect: 1. governance capabilities2. Future roadmap 3. procurement 4. compare products5. Business Interaction for new proposals and vicecersa.