EA Articles / Reference

Enterprise Architect as Enterprise Designer by: Cort Coghill

There is little argument about the need for businesses to constantly examine their ability to provide value to their shareholders, customers, partners, etc. Likewise there is a general consensus that today’s global increasingly digitally-driven economy will only get more complex and continue to change.

In his 1993 Harvard Business Review, Predators and Prey: a New Ecology of Competition, James F. Moore observed businesses exist as a part of an ecosystem. Within this ecosystem businesses (or enterprises) travel a path of evolution where they initiate, expand or change, and even possibly die. These evolutionary changes drive interactions with partners and competitors in the ecosystem. This ecosystem is visible in every aspect of business (local or global, private, and public sectors). The interactions are complex as well as always changing and are comprised of many different variables to include regulatory, economic, human, and technological. Changes in any of these variables are greater than the sum of their parts as they are always interacting dynamically with the potential for cascading failure or success equally possible.

Introduction to Mount Rushmore Articles by John A. Zachman

I am greatly honored and deeply humbled by what Bill Inmon has written about me in his articles. I have also known many of the folks that Bill mentions in his articles (below) and I have been significantly influenced by their contributions. I must say that most of them, not all, but almost all have been very gracious and virtually unassuming about their own contributions. Not the least of these is Bill, himself. In virtually every presentation that I make longer than an hour or two, I observe the genius of Data Warehouse... the genius of the idea itself, but also more appropriately, the genius of its author, Bill Inmon.

Recently I read a commentary about Zachman's work by an enterprise architect. He had admittedly not used Zachman's work for many years in his early career, he was just now examining it. Then he rendered faint praise. This struck me as odd, as Zachman's work is fundamental to understanding enterprise architecture. If you do not understand Zachman's work, how can you claim to be an enterprise architect? Certainly you cannot have a good grasp of the subject. Regardless of what framework you use (even no framework), you need to understand Zachman's work.

(An Argument For Why We a Continued Professional Development Requirement)

The below formula is a rough approximation for the exponential nature of forgetting¹. Where R is memory retention, S is strength of memory, and t, of course, being time. Why does this matter? Chances are, if you are reading this blog that you have some interest, if not a commitment, to learning. Moreover, you likely have invested resources (e.g. time, money, etc.,) in gaining knowledge, such as an education on Enterprise Architecture.

Since 2002, the FEAC® Institute has been training, educating and certifying Enterprise Architects and Business Analysts in the practice of Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Analysis all around the globe. Over the years, we have graduated thousands of Certified Enterprise Architects (CEAs) and Associate Certified Enterprise Architects (ACEA) in various Enterprise Architecture frameworks and methodologies like FEAF, DoDAF, Zachman®, TOGAF and more. We have trained thousands more in our workshops and education sessions, worldwide. Countless FEAC graduates have gone on to high-level Government positions and executive-level private sector positions upon earning their CEA™ (Black Belt), ACEA™ (Green Belt) or CEAP™ (Yellow Belt) designations. Only FEAC offers these designations with a world-class faculty of practitioners who are Enterprise Architects in the real world, and which has included current and former US Federal Chief Enterprise Architects.

Our program features the thought leaders and instructors in the field of enterprise architecture and engineering, including John Zachman, the creator of the Zachman Framework™, considered the father of Enterprise Architecture and author of numerous EA publications. He has instructed in the Certification program since FEAC™ Institute’s inception. We have the most robust pool of world-renown instructors who teach in our programs - not academics, but real EA practitioners.

There is quite a bit of talk about Enterprise Architecture Certifications these days. With the number of articles and marketing plans devoted to getting people to take different EA certifications, do actual architecture or implement this idea or that, it’s no wonder there is some confusion.

The Framework for Enterprise Architecture: Background, Description and Utility by: John A. Zachman

In the early ‘80’s, there was little interest in the idea of Enterprise Engineering or Enterprise Modeling and the use of formalisms and models was generally limited to some aspects of application development within the Information Systems community. The subject of architecture was acknowledged at that time, however, there was little definition to support the concept. This lack of definition precipitated the initial investigation that ultimately resulted in the “Framework for Information Systems Architecture” (later referred to as The Zachman Framework). Although from the outset, it was clear that it should have been referred to as the “Framework for Enterprise Architecture,” that enlarged perspective could only now begin to be generally understood as a result of the relatively recent and increased, world-wide focus on Enterprise Engineering.

In all those stories John A. Zachman is telling us, we can recognize frequently an opposition, implicit or explicit, between two ways of perceiving the future: the long and the short term. This difference in the duration of looking forward is fundamental: “Life’s trade-off in its most simplistic form is between the short term (“immediate gratification”) and the long term (what’s ‘good’ for us)“ (1999).1 And as the world is not a perfect place, we are tempted to compromise the long term: “the pressure for immediate gratification [...] is enormous” (1999). Zachman is convinced that we should resist this pressure, in order to find the right balance in this trade-off. And the best way to resist is to choose rational and informed.

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. . . . As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.” -- Abraham Lincoln, message to Congress, Dec. 1, 1862, just before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.¹

Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been in the peripheral vision of information technology (IT) professionals for many years. John Zachman’s work on a framework for EA, begun years earlier, was first published in 1987.² In 1996, the US Congress passed the Clinger-Cohen Act, which created the position of Chief Information Officer (CIO) in all federal organizations and assigned them responsibility for all IT budget, personnel, and architecture.³

Executive Summary

For over four decades, IT strategy has been about the alignment of technology with the needs of the business. Many factors have affected the business-IT relationship over the years, including the increased focus on accounting compliance support, high-profile failures of IT initiatives, disappointing returns on IT investment, the cyclic centralization and decentralization of what constitutes the “best practices” of IT, and the perception that technology is no longer a strategic corporate advantage and is best available through cloud service providers. Less obvious is the rise of the IT vendor community and the effects on both IT practitioners and the business users. Certification to vendor solutions has commanded the loyalty of the IT technical personnel, making them more able to change jobs but less dependent upon companies where they work. The specialization of the vendors to develop and market a world class application to support a discreet business process, optimizing part of the business at the expense of the whole, has often thrust business management into the role of matchmaker between IT vendors and the internal IT department(s) who serve the company.

EA represents a new way of thinking about the enterprise, and a new way of managing the enterprise, and its IT. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke calls it “intangible capital.”

Those who study advances in health care and other fields find a “generation” lag of about 20 years before discoveries are adopted haphazardly into standard practice. And three or four generations before an innovation, be it technical or intellectual, becomes so common that we no longer think of it as an innovation at all. Thus it is said that “science proceeds by the death of scientists.”

Seven years ago the senior leadership at SIL International (see Chart 1), a not-for-profit whose purpose is to facilitate language-based development among the peoples of the world, determined that it was time to build an integrated Enterprise Information System. There were three precipitating factors: mission critical IT systems were almost twenty years old and on the verge of obsolescence, their landscape was dotted with dozens of silo systems, and commitments to new strategic directions demanded significant business re-engineering.

Understanding and Leveraging Synergies Among the Major EA Frameworks by: The Open Group

The following presentation and panel discussion, which together examine the role and benefits of how Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks can co-exist well, are provided by moderator Allen Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer, The Open Group; John Zachman, Chairman and CEO of Zachman International, and originator of the Zachman Framework, and Steve Nunn, vice president and chief operating officer of The Open Group.[Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.] Here are some excerpts:

Framework for Success - Survey

Zachman International® and the FEAC Institute® would like your contribution to our body of knowledge on the current state of EA in the enterprise. Government, private industry all professional input is welcome. No private information is being collected so responses are completely private and anonymous.

The following is copy of the Open Group's interview tih John A. Zachman in prepraration for his tutorial on the synergy between The Zachman Framework™ and TOGAF® for The Open Goup - Enabling Boundaryless Information Flow Conference in San Diego - February 2-5, 2015.

A Conversation with Dr. Ann Reedy by: John P. Zachman

At the FEAC Institute, we pride ourselves on the instruction given by our world-class group of faculty and instructors. Not only are we the longest running EA certifying Institute in the US, but we offer instruction by professionals who influence Enterprise Architecture in their every-day careers.

We'd like to give you the opportunity to meet some of these professionals in a short conversation in order to demonstrate the level of instruction offered at the FEAC Institute.

Yes, "Enterprise Architecture is Relative" BUT it is not Arbitrary by: John A. Zachman

My friend Roger Sessions recently quoted me in a tweet on Twitter as saying “Architecture is relative.” He likely got that quote from one of two places – either he was reading the original article I wrote in 1982 that was subsequently published in the IBM Systems Journal in 1987 in which I developed the idea that “There is a set of architectural representations produced over the process of building a complex engineering product representing the different perspectives of the different participants.” I went on to identify those different participants as the Owner of the end product (the ‘customer’), the Designer of the product (the ‘engineer’ or ‘architect’) and the Builder of the product (the ‘manufacturing engineer’ or ‘contractor’).

The Zachman Framework™ has evolved over time and has a rich history in the space we call "Enterprise Architecture." While the fundamental concepts have not changed at all, refinements to its graphical representation, in addition to more precise language, embody The Framework's history and what you see today. Here is a brief trip down its historical evolution...

Author’s Note: Please remember, I originally wrote this article in the late 1990’s and updated it in 2000. The logic and the narrative of the article are fine. The principles discussed are currently valid. However, as explained in the 2009 article “Yes ‘Enterprise Architecture’ Is Relative BUT It Is Not Arbitrary” much of the linguistic confusion described here is resolved. (In the current version of the Framework graphic I use noun-modified-nouns instead of adjective-modified-nouns.) Unfortunately, if I update this article to reflect the current Framework graphic terminology, it would lose some of the sense of and most of the fun of the argument. Read on … I am sure you will get the point.

The following are a glossary of terms from John A. Zachman about The Zachman Framework™ and Enterprise Architecture:

Here is a popular, new question that is posed to me: “What kind of impact is the rise in cloud computing having on enterprise architecture?”

Mendeleev "discovered" the periodic table, the set of elements in nature that all matter is made from. Gandalf is... well, the old guy that waves his staff and makes things happen outside of natural laws.

The former’s discoveries have led to the explosive advances in industrial manufacturing that we take for granted today. The latter’s (or rather, the author’s) have given us those brief moments of escape from reality that help preserve our sanity

"When ModernAnalyst asked me to propose an article for their issue on Enterprise Architecture, I thought about the question framework developed by John Zachman, that provides the basic building blocks of that practice. The primary function of a Business Analyst is to ask questions that uncover requirements then to document those requirements so they may be developed into a useful, useable system. It seemed to me that questions are a common thread for the Enterprise Architect, Data Architect, and Business Analyst alike. As the conversation progressed, I realized that I could reach out to John Zachman and pose a few questions to him about Enterprise Architecture. This article will be split between a brief interview, Q&A with John Zachman, and a more detailed overview, Data Architecture..."

There appears to be a gross misunderstanding about Architecture, particularly in the information technology community. Many people seem to think that an implementation, an end result, is Architecture. To use an Architecture and Construction example, many people think that the Roman Coliseum is Architecture.

In April 2007, Perspectives of the International Association of Software Architects' Editor-in-Chief, Roger Sessions, held an exclusive interview John Zachman.

1992 IBM Systems Journal- Extending and Formalizing the Framework for Information Systems Architecture

"John Zachman introduced a framework for information systems architecture (ISA) that has been widely adopted by systems analysts and database designers. It provides a taxonomy for relating the concepts that describe the real work to the concepts that describe an information system and its implementation. The ISA framework has a simple elegance that makes it easy to remember, yet it draws attention to fundamental distinctions that are often overlooked in systems design. This paper presents the framework and its recent extensions and shows how it can be formalized in the notation of conceptual graphs."

1987 IBM Systems Journal- A Framework for Information Systems Architecture

"With increasing size and complexity of the implementations of information systems, it is necessary to use some logical construct (or architecture) for defining and controlling the interfaces and the integration of all of the components of the system. This paper defines information systems architecture by creating a descriptive framework from disciplines quite independent of information systems, then by analogy specifies information systems architecture based upon the neutral, objective framework. Also, some preliminary conclusions about the implications of the resultant descriptive framework are drawn. The discussion is limited to architecture and does not include a strategic planning methodology."

The Zachman Framework™ is a schema - the intersection between two historical classifications that have been in use for literally thousands of years. The first is the fundamentals of communication found in the primitive interrogatives: What, How, When, Who, Where, and Why. It is the integration of answers to these questions that enables the comprehensive, composite description of complex ideas. The second is derived from reification, the transformation of an abstract idea into an instantiation that was initially postulated by ancient Greek philosophers and is labeled in the Zachman Framework™: Identification, Definition, Representation, Specification, Configuration and Instantiation.