“Architecture is no longer a technical discipline” – in conversation with Maxime Vande Ghinste

An enterprise and solutions architect, Maxime Vande Ghinste has taken a path well off the beaten track.

We sat down with him to talk about his view of the profession, the distinctly Belgian way of practising architecture, and the impact of AI on the field.

Hi Maxime, tell us about your career so far.

It’s a slightly unconventional one. Fairly early on I became head of architecture at STIB-MIVB, the Brussels public transport operator, where I also took on management responsibilities. Then a rather mad opportunity came up, so I left that post and became an entrepreneur: for two years I set up and ran a business built around autonomous trolleys. A large part of my DNA comes from there – that instinct to get out of the office and onto the ground. Along the way, though, I discovered that my real calling was architecture. Today I’m an independent consultant, working with several clients including the European institutions, mainly on solution architecture engagements.

When you begin a new engagement, where do you start?

With people. Honestly, I don’t think I’m the best architect – I’m a perfectly decent one. What I do believe I have is excellent communication skills, and that’s where it all comes down. Designing the finest architecture in the world is pointless if nobody takes ownership of it. The architect’s real job is to spread that architecture across the organisation. So when I arrive somewhere, the first thing I do is go and see people; I quickly build up a network of those who hold the information. Knowing how to ask the right questions of the right people is a genuine architect’s skill.

You place a lot of emphasis on communication. Why?

Because the nature of the job has changed. To my mind, architecture is no longer a technical discipline: you move out of pure technology and into a management role. You handle stakeholders and communication dynamics – on a technical foundation, of course – but being an architect isn’t about being a technical specialist. The aim isn’t to turn up offering wildly complicated technologies. It’s to build buy-in around the table, to get different people moving forward together towards the next step. Being able to explain a technology in plain terms, and to set out a strategic vision clearly, is central to it all.

You often draw a parallel between architecture and dance. What does that tell us?

The link is really with leadership. In the dance I do, there’s a leader and a follower, but in reality it isn’t so clear-cut: one person initiates the movement, the other follows, and everything rests on the connection between the two. That is exactly what an architect’s leadership is. You don’t impose; you initiate, and you create the conditions for others to follow. That’s why I link architecture far more to leadership than to pure technique.

Do you have a concrete example of an engagement that shows how you work?

Yes. I worked with a public mobility company in Brussels whose landscape was very “application-centric”. They wanted to become more “data-centric”. When I analysed that landscape, the finding was surprising: they already had almost all the pieces needed to get there, but they couldn’t articulate the strategy. Very often the building blocks are in place, but what’s missing is the clarity from management to know how to arrange them and unlock the full potential of the technology. My job was to reorganise what already existed, add a few building blocks – cloud integration technologies in particular, to connect everything to SaaS tools – and, above all, to make the direction legible so that management could communicate it clearly. For me, that’s the heart of the job: arranging what is already there.

You work in Belgium, a distinctive market. How would you describe it?

The Belgian market is fascinating, not least because of the linguistic divide, which is about far more than language. Dutch speakers have a very structured working culture, fairly Germanic, drawing on northern countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark, where enterprise architecture is widely practised. They like to bring structure. The French-speaking side is more Latin, more inclined towards the spoken word: meetings multiply to thrash out strategy, but there’s less of a focus on formalising things and writing reports. In Brussels I work with both worlds, plus the European institutions, and that mix creates something completely different.

Fundamentally, I see two kinds of company: those still stuck in the old mindset, with a very rigid architecture they lean on to make decisions, and the newer ones, far more agile and able to respond to change. There are also two communities of architects eyeing each other warily: the old guard, who want an exhaustive repository and perfectly rigid diagrams, at the cost of an architecture that barely evolves; and a much more agile community, which seeks to challenge how things are done and to guide companies through their transformation. The big challenge today is connecting the business and IT.

And some companies no longer even talk about architecture…

We’re at a crossroads. With AI, the whole way of doing IT is being challenged. Managers are once again asking themselves: do we still need an IT department, do we still need architects? That is precisely the essence of the book A Seat at the Table. But even if the architect’s role isn’t held by someone with that title, it still exists within the company: someone has to identify the business capabilities, structure a strategy and say which IT assets will bring it to life. That job has to be done, whatever the company. Will it be done by an architect in the strict sense? Not necessarily, it also depends on the culture.

In practical terms, how do you see AI transforming the role?

I think it will change it a great deal, especially for the solution architect. Arthur Mensch said something interesting: developers used to be craftsmen; now they’re becoming managers who coordinate what the agents produce for them. In that dynamic, developers will have to raise their game and develop a better understanding of the systemic dynamics of a solution. The architect’s role then becomes crucial in structuring ideas, in a setting where it’s no longer us doing the craftwork but the agents.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean the developer disappears. Anything to do with debugging, production support or quality control demands real knowledge of the code. You can’t just push assets into production without quality checks. I often draw the parallel with industrial production lines: you no longer control every single action, but you do control what comes out the other end. It’s like a toaster: would you rather buy a new one every ten years, or keep one for life and replace the parts yourself? IT is a bit like that.

A final conviction?

Know the business above all else. At STIB, I’d ride routes I didn’t know just to see how they worked, and my team and I did a tour of the various modes of transport. It’s hardly disruptive, but it’s still far too rarely done – and yet it makes all the difference.

Maxime Vande Ghinste is the founder of Lift iT, an enterprise architecture consultancy whose promise is to turn architecture into a genuine lever for strategic steering, and to bridge the gap between your ambitious business vision and your technical reality.