"I know of banks and automotive companies where developers are actively discouraged from making any architecture decisions without going up the chain" ... "So these architects create more formal documents, in hopes of making the system more clear, using much more of the tools the common literature describes."
Having consulted in such environments you have to remember that most of the large projects there are implicitly expected to fail, so CYA has become ingrained very deeply into the culture.
I stopped taking these jobs once it fully dawned on me that getting results in terms of on budget, on time, delivery while delighting users was never the prime objective, but using each project as a battleground in a perpetual internal jousting match for power grabs was.
Having consulted in such environments you have to remember that most of the large projects there are implicitly expected to fail, so CYA has become ingrained very deeply into the culture.
I stopped taking these jobs once it fully dawned on me that getting results in terms of on budget, on time, delivery while delighting users was never the prime objective, but using each project as a battleground in a perpetual internal jousting match for power grabs was.