March 4, 2008

John Zachman and Enterprise Architecture

In the Journal of Enterprise Architecture, February 2008, John Zachman, the father of EA, talks about core definitional elements of enterprise architecture.
  • Enterprise versus IT or Applications Architecture—”First Enterprise Architecture constitutes a paradigm shift and many people have not yet been inclined to make the mental, cultural, and behavioral adjustment to engineering and manufacturing the enterprise” and I love that phase—engineering the enterprise!

“Because…many of the skills required to the work of enterprise architecture are typically found in the Information Systems community, some people misconstrue the Framework intent as an Information Systems schema rather than its true intent as an ENTERPRISE schema.”

And not only is the Zachman Framework misconstrued as an Information Systems schema, but many people mistakenly confuse the whole EA with IT or applications architecture. But EA is not focused on IT or applications, but rather on the overall organization—the enterprise.

  • Lexicon—“As global communication and collaboration expands, there is an increasing requirement for semantic coherence. If people’s words do not mean the same thing, there is neither communication nor collaboration”—another good one, semantic coherence!

Without a lexicon with common definitions and standards for usage, we will not be talking to each other, but past each other.

Moreover, if we can’t even define EA elements in a common way, then how can we ever make them interoperable?

As Zachman says, “The underlying classification and components of architecture must be consistent for any interoperability (internal or external) to be effected.”

  • Classification, Taxonomy, and Ontology—“Enterprises are complex. Managing the knowledge base of the enterprise that is required for enterprise operation and change is complex. The key to managing complexity is classification.”

This is so true. We need to categorize and relate items to make sense of them. Moreover, I would say we need to roll this information up to what I call the profile level—the big picture, strategic view using information visualization—so that our executives and decision makers can quickly understand the information and come to a decision point.

“Humanity for seven thousand years has found no mechanism for accommodating complexity and change other than architecture,” says Zachman.

EA is the way to plan, manage, and measure change in our increasingly complex world. And if we don’t take control over our enterprises and their future destiny, then we will be controlled by them.


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