I read this article at SD Times (referred to by Scott Allen’s blog). Scott looked at it with a humorous slant but I tend to get frustraited when I see these kinds of attempts to draw a nice neat box around what the various positions in the IT industry do.
The reality is that computing as a profession is still too young to define in any meaningful way what the role of a software architect is let alone develop a test to judge a candidates suitability for the job. Further, the materials that we use to do our job are different depending on which platform you use, so a certification supported by Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM and Sun is definately going to be slanted towards the approaches that work for their platforms.
Today we essentially have something skin to very diverse and geographically distributed tribes of pre-historic man, each isolated enough to be developing unique approaches to tackling their problems. If you force them together too early there is a great opportunity lost to cultivate new technologies and skills.