Zachman International - The Official Home of The Zachman Framework™

The September issue of The Enterprise Newsletter (TEN), published an article about The Zachman Framework™ by Stan Locke: Enterprise Convergence in our Lifetime. Also in this issue, Clive Finkelstein, publisher, was inducted into highly prestigious Pearcey 2008 Hall of Fame.

The following are excerpts from the article Enterprise Convergence in our Lifetime:
...During the mid eighties, IBM was very strong in formulating Business Systems Planning (BSP) studies with their customers, but couldn't really get these into implemented systems that could move the enterprise to where it need to go. Along came an IBM planner John Zachman who proposed a convergence theory of the 'architecture' for information systems. With his strong customer ties to the aerospace industry, manufacturing sectors, and personal architect friends, Zachman soon understood that moving the global plan to implementation involved several different 'stakeholder' representations. Hence, the fundamental notions of owner, designer and builder perspectives were identified.

...However, when the framework schema is only materialized in matrix form, it can be easily misinterpreted. Sorely misunderstood, for instance, is that the 'framework' is a top to bottom decomposition where each perspective continues the hierarchy details from above. The truth is that adding detail is a function of a cell not a column. Also misunderstood is that the columns are ordered as depicted. The truth is that the columns have no set order and the 'order' of enterprise examination is a methodology value judgment. Another misconception is that having all the class (cell) contents would somehow magically deliver a functioning enterprise. This occurs because most folks have missed the other two associations outside the relationship association within cell which creates primitive models. These associations are: the integration associations between each cell and every other cell across the row; and the transformation associations down the column linking all the items in the cell above with the cell below.

...Much of the confusion and misinterpretation about what constitutes a perspective model (as a single row), a single variable model (a single column), a primitive model (a single cell) and a composite model (more than one cell) has been removed by the refined framework terms. For example the scope context for the enterprise is the integrated set of lists identifying the items from the environment that will be included in or excluded from the enterprise operations. The business concepts defined by the semantic models connects all the terms by associations for each of the six primitive models integrated across the row and aligned by transformation from the identified scope boundary lists. Similarly, the system logic represented in the schematics models describe all of the defined business concepts in terms of their characteristics, properties and attributes in a manner that allows the each item to be aligned with the business definition.

The complete article can be found at IES: