John Zachman has announced changes to his operating companies. ZIFA will be winding down and Zachman International will be the primary organization for delivering Zachman Framework related products and services.

Stan Locke will be Managing Director and President, and John's son, John P. Zachman will be VP of Marketing.  David Kingston, of Toronto, will be VP Customer Support Systems.

Sam Holcman of Pinnacle Business Group and partner in ZIFA will be moving on to his work in EACOE.

John also announced a new website, which looks great (it also uses a content management system similar to InfoAdvisors' site).

• Register

• for our iPod Touch® Give-away! (even if you are already a member).

• for the new Enterprise Standards

• to see or print the new Enterprise Framework2 graphic.

• Review

• my own 'wikipedia' concise definition of The Zachman Framework.

• the details of Zachman Certified requirements for practitioners, methodologies and tools.

• current and popular articles and reference material.

• Frequently Asked Questions that I personally have answered.

• timely announcements and press releases.

• Purchase our support products (requires registration)

• Various editions of my eBook.

• any of the new Zachman Framework2 posters.

• the new Framework2 model kits .

• An annual subscription to access the MetaFrameworks research work

• See and plan for

• Attending a scheduled conference engagement

• Attending a MasterClass course on our schedule.

• Requesting an in-house seminars or executive briefings.

If you register for the new site (and you should, even if you previously registered with ZIFA), you will be eligible to win an iPod Touch.  John is doing the right thing by not assuming that information collected as part of ZIFA should be reused without your consent for ZI.  So get over there and register.

So get on over there, register, and dip into all the great stuff available.

Zachman International

It's Friday and I thought you'd all enjoy watching this video to remind you of your favorite data & process modeling sessions.  This one is about the interactions between overly-zealous marketing consultants and a designer, but I can certainly see parallels to some possible business processes I've been pitched by overly-zealous business people.

Of course, now that I think about it, I've definitely been pitched data models that looked a lot like the resulting product of this video...Hmmmmmm.

Creating A Stop Sign video

The ERSIG organizers are pleased to announce the next ERSIG online meeting! Please join us on Wednesday, July 30, at 7PM UTC /6PM BST /1PM EDT /12PM CDT /11AM MDT /10AM PDT for...

"Going Beyond Database Modeling: LDMs for X-Solution Design and Integration," by Mehmet Orun from Genentech.

There will be a Q&A session following the presentation.

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Wednesday, July 30 at 7PM UTC /6PM BST /1PM EDT /12PM CDT /11AM MDT /10AM PDT

Meeting URL:

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/embarcadero/join?id=ERSIGJuly&role=attend

&pw=ERSIG

Alternate URL:https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/embarcadero/join

Meeting ID: ERSIGJuly

Entry Code: ERSIG

Audio Conferencing (Toll): +1 (702) 902-0735

Audio Conferencing (Toll-free): +1 (866) 533-0065

Participant Code: ERSIG

FIRST-TIME USERS

To save time before the meeting, check your system to make sure it is ready to use Microsoft Office Live Meeting.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=90703

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ERSIG meets online for an hour every other month. Users from the ER/Studio community will present on a variety of topics and we will have a Q&A session following the presentations. Please visit http://www.embarcadero.com/resources/usergroups.html for all the latest ERSIG information.

We hope to see you online.

Best regards,

Your ERSIG Leadership Team

Bruce Baum, Chris Bradley, Mehmet Orun, and Kevin Phelps

Search Data Management has a crash course in BI Basics on their website and it looks like it could be a great resource for both new and experienced data management professionals.

Business intelligence basics

04 Jun 2008 | Kathryn Marquis, Assistant Editor

Business intelligence (BI) is about more than just technology. Experts say BI also requires a strategy for organizing people and processes -- as well as a clear vision of organizational goals, performance requirements, key performance indicators (KPIs) and more.

This business intelligence basics guide is a resource for professionals involved in all aspects of BI -- from building a business case to writing a request for proposal (RFP) for BI technology to designing executive dashboards. This guide covers BI basics and can be useful in many ways, including getting a quick overview of the discipline and training new employees.

It even addresses the Kimball versus Inmon debates.  Check it out.

Business intelligence basics

A recent discussion on our ERwin User Discussion Group focused on where to find the technical papers on SupportConnect, CA's support website.  Tim Hemphill was kind enough to share the link:

https://support.ca.com/irj/portal/anonymous/phpdocs?filePath=0/260/260_techdocindex.html

Papers that look especially useful given recent ERwin User Discussion Group questions:

• TEC463726 Complete Compare: eliminate unnecessary object comparison.
• TEC413401 How to use the Metadata Integration Wizard to Import and Export Data Using Excel
• TEC462698 Complete Compare: some Primary Key indexes show matching membership but mismatched names. In the model, those indexes seem to have no members. Why is that?