\section{Introduction}

One of the big challenges of today is: How do we get more, and effective, system architects?
At Philips and the Embedded Systems Institute we have been very successful in
teaching the non-technical aspects of systems architecting to people.
This course, called SARCH, has been given 36 times (May 2006) to about 570 participants.
We also provide the Embedded Systems Architecting course (ESA), that has been given more than 20 times to more
than 300 participants, which addresses the technical broadening of designers.
We identified a number of missing steps in between these courses:
addressing multi-disciplinary design.
We fill this hole by ''single aspect'' courses that address one aspect at the time, for instance, performance
or reliability. The performance oriented course, that has been given 7 times to about 100 people,
is also successful.
The next course that we developed to fill this hole is the Multi-Objective System Architecting and Design (MOSAD)
course. The evaluation after 3 courses revealed a problem:
the participants are satisfied, but the teacher is not satisfied.
The dissatisfaction of the teacher is that the participants pick up many 
submethods and techniques provided in the course, but they struggle to integrate
this into an architecting approach.

\FigureImposeWidth{DTAdecomposition}{Decomposing Contributing Factors}{.6\textwidth}

This conclusion triggered the analysis of critical success factors for system architects.
We decomposed these factors into four categories: {\it education}, {\it experience}, {\it environment},
and {\it nature}, as shown in Figure~\ref{fig:DTAdecomposition}.
We will discuss these four categories in separate sections.
We will start with a section about the architect, to create a baseline for the further analysis.
