John Zachman

“About John Zachman at zachman.com”

“I came from the information strategy community in the early days and even by the late 1960's, we were quite competent to do information strategy. Although the strategy tools and the methods have improved substantially, the analytical process was quite good understood decades ago. Our problem was, we were have grave difficulties getting from strategy... to implementation.”

“Issues of quality, timeliness and change are the conditions that are forcing us to face up to the issues of enterprise architecture. The precedent of all the older disciplines known today establishes the concept of architecture as central to the ability to produce quality and timely results and to manage change in complex products. Architecture is the cornerstone for containing enterprise frustration and leveraging technology innovations to fulfill the expectations of a viable and dynamic Information Age enterprise.”

“The Information Age is unfolding just as predicted by many of the sociological prognosticators of this century. Information issues are on everyone’s mind and on multitudes of lips. It is hard to pick up a newspaper or current affairs magazine without seeing a feature on the internet, web pages, e-mail, television terminals or some other new technology. In fact, technology innovation is relentless and escalating and technology stocks continually drive the stock market to high after high. There is no field of human endeavor that is exempt from the onslaught of information technology.”

“It is only the advent of an automated model storage facility or repository that brings any of this into the realm of feasibility and makes architecture a reality. It does not mean to suggest that all of these ideas will be immediately available in any particular repository product. It only means that they come into the realm of feasibility as repository technology becomes a reality.”

“Soon, the enterprise of the information age will find itself immobilized if it does not have the ability to tap the information resources within and without its boundaries.”

“The world contains entities, processes, locations, people, times, and purposes. Computer systems are filled with bits, bytes, numbers, and the programs that manipulate them. If the computer is to do anything useful, the concrete things in the world must be related to the abstract bits in the computer. Zachman’s framework for information systems architecture (ISA) makes that link. It provides a systematic taxonomy of concepts for relating things in the world to the representations in the computer.”

“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.”

“[Zachman reasons that] an analogous set of architectural representations is likely to be produced in building any complex product.”

“[In Mr. Zachman's view] the architect's drawings [represent] a transcription of the owner's perceptual requirements.”

“To keep the business from disintegrating, the concept of information systems architecture is becoming less of an option and more of a necessity”

“Decentralization without structure is chaos.”

“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.”

“The analytical approach employed by both BSP and BISC is "top down". The implications of the words "top down" are multiple and varied, and all apply to these analysis. For instance:”

“Although many popular information systems planning methodologies, design approaches, and various tools and techniques do not preclude or are not inconsistent with enterprise-level analysis, few of them explicitly address or attempt to define enterprise architectures. Some examples of such popular offerings include”

“Business System Planning (BSP) and Business Information Control Study (BICS) are representative of enterprise analysis tools that are growing in importance and are likely to become mandatory for ant business that continues to grow and evolve.”

“Business System Planning (BSP) and Business Information Control Study (BICS) are two information system planning study methodologies that specifically employ enterprise analysis techniques in the course of their analysis. Underlying the BSP and BICS analysis are the data management problems that result from systems design approaches that optimize the management of technology at the expense of managing the data.”

“(Enterprise Architecture is) the set of descriptive representations (i.e., models) that are relevant for describing an Enterprise such that it can be produced to management's requirements (quality) and maintained over the period of its useful life.”

“It is not adequate merely to produce running code. In the long term, enterprise value lies in the models themselves. They have intrinsic value in their own right, as they constitute the baseline for managing change”

“A framework as it applies to enterprises is simply a logical structure for classifying and organising the descriptive representations of an enterprise that are significant to the management of the enterprise as well as to the development of the enterprise's system [with the aim of] rationalising the carious concepts and specifications in order to provide for clarity of professional communication, to allow for improving and integrating development methodologies and tools, and to establish credibility and confidence in the investment of systems resources.”