October 13, 2020
In 1987, John Zachman, an IBM researcher, was tasked with investigating why IT system development projects’ success (i.e., cost, schedule, quality) rate across all industries was a dismal 16%. He reached the conclusion that project stakeholders had different “perspectives” (i.e., concerns, viewpoints) of the system which often led to “business-IT” misalignment. He offered a solution, “Information Systems Architecture,” which aimed to create a set of viewpoints or pictures of the business from both an interrogative dimension (i.e., who, what, when, etc…) as well as a stakeholder perspective (i.e., business strategist, engineer, etc…). In the early 1990s, he appended his original work with additional viewpoints, coined the term Enterprise Architecture, and published the Zachman Framework. This framework is a taxonomy (i.e., catalog, ontology) of business and technology architectures that aims to define a “blueprint” of the business (i.e., enterprise). Each of the (36) cells in the framework is primitive and thus, each can be described or modeled independently. Taken together, these viewpoints provide a complete understanding of an organization – i.e., Enterprise Architecture. The “Enterprise Architecture Blog” is dedicated to helping to explain and promote this important, yet often misunderstood, management discipline.