John Zachman

John A. Zachman (born December 16, 1934) is an American business and IT consultant, early pioneer of enterprise architecture, Chief Executive Officer of Zachman International, and originator of the Zachman Framework.

Sourced

• A significant observation regarding... architectural representations is that each is of a different nature than the others. They are not merely a set of representations, each of which is an increasing level of detail than the previous one. Level of detail is an independent variable, varying within each architectural representation.
  • Zachman (1986) as cited in: Peter Bernus, Kai Mertins, Günter Schmidt (2005) Handbook on Architectures of Information Systems. p.544

When the rate of change increases to the point that real time required to assimilate change exceeds the time in with change must be manifest, the enterprise is going to find itself in deep yohurt.
Zachman (1994)

• When the rate of change increases to the point that real time required to assimilate change exceeds the time in with change must be manifest, the enterprise is going to find itself in deep yohurt.
  • Zachman (1994) cited in: Ronald G. Ross (2003) Principles of the Business Rule Approach. p.35

• 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.
  • Zachman cited in: Egon Berghout and Dan Remenyi, Egon Berghout (2003) Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Information Technology Evaluation - 2003. p.503
  • In this quote the "framework" refers to the Zachman Framework

• 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
  • Zachman cited in: Carol O'Rourke, Neal Fishman, Warren Selkow (2003) Enterprise architecture using the Zachman Framework. p.538

• [John A. Zachman (1987) defines the architecture as] 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.
  • Zachman (1987) cited in: Antonio Laganà, Marina L. Gavrilova, Vipin Kumar (2004) Computational Science and Its Applications -- ICCSA 2004. p.604

A framework for information systems architecture, 1987

John Zachman (1987) "A framework for information systems architecture". In: IBM Systems Journal, Vol 26, Issue 3, p.276-292

• 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.
  • p.276, cited in: CM Pereira (2004) "A method to define an Enterprise Architecture using the Zachman Framework". in: SAC '04 Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Applied computing. pp. 1366-1371

• Decentralization without structure is chaos.
  • p.276 cited in: Robert Mylls (1994) Information engineering: CASE, practices and techniques. p.8

To keep the business from disintegrating, the concept of information systems architecture is becoming less of an option and more of a necessity
Zachman, 1987.

• To keep the business from disintegrating, the concept of information systems architecture is becoming less of an option and more of a necessity
  • p.276, cited in: Jaap Schekkerman (2003) How to Survive in the Jungle of Enterprise Architecture. p.131

• [In Mr. Zachman's view] the architect's drawings [represent] a transcription of the owner's perceptual requirements.
  • p.278 cited in: David C. Hay (2003) Requirements Analysis: From Business Views to Architecture. p.5
  • In the 1987 article Zachman states: The architect’s drawings are a transcription of the owner’s perceptual requirements.

• [Zachman reasons that] an analogous set of architectural representations is likely to be produced in building any complex product.
  • p.281 as cited in: San Murugesan, Yogesh Deshpande (2001 Web Engineering: Managing Diversity and Complexity of Web. p,126

• 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.
  • p.283. cited in: Stephen L. Montgomery (1994) Object-oriented information engineering: : analysis, design, and implementation. p.279

Extending and formalizing the framework for information systems architecture, 1992

Sowa, J. F.; Zachman, J. A. (1992). "Extending and formalizing the framework for information systems architecture". IBM Systems Journal, 31(3), pp. 590–616

• 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.
  • John Zachman & John F. Sowa (1992, p.613), cited in: Nik Bessis, Fatos Xhafa (2011) Next Generation Data Technologies for Collective Computational Intelligence. p.84

About

• 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.
  • J.A. Zachman (1997) "Enterprise architecture: The issue of the century". In: Database Programming and Design, 1997

External links

• About John Zachman at zachman.com