Zachman on Zachman

website@infoadvisors.com — Tue, 23 May 2006 15:47:00 GMT

John Zachman is interviewed by SearchDataManagement.com about the origins and benefits of using the Zachman Framework.

What exactly is the Zachman Framework?
Zachman: The best way to understand it is through a metaphor. The whole idea has to do with architecture. In the early 70s, we [IBM] were doing information strategy work at airplane manufacturing companies. It was obvious that airplane manufacturers knew what architecture was relative to airplanes. They were producing extremely complex objects - airplanes. And they could maintain them for an extremely long time. So, they could deal with extreme complexity and extreme change.
If you're going to create a complex object, you need to be able to describe it. For example, if you cannot describe the airplane, you cannot create the airplane. On top of that, once you get it created and then you want to change it -- how do you do that? You go back to your descriptive representations, which are the basis for change. If you want to deal with complexity and change, then you are going to deal with architecture. It doesn't make any difference if you're talking about buildings, or airplanes, or supercomputers or enterprises.

Karen Lopez: Musings on Data, Process, and Architecture

Zachman on Zachman