Erecting the Framework, Part I
John Zachman, the father of enterprise architecture, reflects on the influences and impacts of his "periodic table of the enterprise"
Interview by Dan Ruby
Posted February 19, 2004
"You can engineer the enterprise just like you can engineer anything else." So says John Zachman, the retired IBM executive whose groundbreaking 1987 and 1993 articles are widely credited with founding the discipline of enterprise architecture and led to the development of The Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture (see Figure 1). Today the field is taking hold as a strategic function within many corporate and government information systems departments. Zachman, on behalf of his Zachman Institute for Framework Advancement (ZIFA), continues to lecture widely on advanced topics such as metaframeworks and federated architectures (see the sidebar, "What Is the Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture?").
Enterprise Architect Online caught up with Zachman at a recent ZIFA Forum for this wide-ranging interview. In this first part Zachman discusses the beginnings of the framework's development, how it was shaped, and how it evolved. In part II of the interview Zachman discusses his influences for developing the framework, how the framework compares with Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements, and his feelings about the framework's implementation in today's technologies. Finally, part III of the interview concludes with a discussion of the framework's implementation, its theoretical approach, and real-world enterprise architecture.
The Roots of Enterprise Architecture
EA: To understand how your thinking about enterprise architecture took shape, how did it evolve from your work at IBM on business systems planning in the 1970s?
Zachman: We were beginning to formalize management systems in the enterprise. My focus was on the strategy process. Remember that management processes were not formalized very long before that. [Peter] Drucker had written the first important book, The Practice of Management [see Resources], only in 1954, so there had not long been even a legitimacy of the discipline of management. Prior to that, the whole concept of formal management processes was a foreign idea.
We began to see the formalization of management in the '60s timeframe. I was at IBM and we were trying to deal with the formalization of the information strategy, which is the logical place to start. By the late '60s we had pretty well figured out how to do it. At least IBM had formalized the methodology it used internally.
Dewey Walker was the manager of architecture at that time within the corporate information systems staff. At that time, IBM had a centralized IS function, and Dewey was one of five guys on the IS control and planning staff. He was responsible for system architecture.
What happened was that the chief of IS retired and the decision was made to decentralize it, putting IS in each individual business unit, and the control and planning staff was going to be sent to the winds. They decided to put Dewey Walker and his architecture work out into large account marketing—to see if any customers cared about this stuff.
So he moved there and set about to document his methodology. He would spend a couple of weeks doing a survey to see if the account had any reason to do this architecture work. That methodology, his two weeks of analysis, is what ultimately became business systems planning, or BSP. Then Dewey left shortly thereafter.
EA: It was a methodology for the sales process?
Zachman: Yes. IBM tried to sell it but couldn't get buyers because they couldn't articulate what it did. They'd say it does architecture, and the customer would say, "Yeah, but what's that?" Ultimately they came to give it away as market support.
People thought it was a self-serving thing to sell hardware, but that wasn't true. Sometimes a hardware order would occur, but that was not what we were trying to do. We were trying to define information systems strategy. I was in the middle of this because I soon became the principle proponent for business systems planning. So people tended to see me as the author of BSP, but I wasn't the author. Dewey Walker was.
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