John Zachman Quotes

Issues of quality, timeliness and change are the conditions that are forcing us to face up to the issues of enterprise architecture. The precedent of all the older disciplines known today establishes the concept of architecture as central to the ability to produce quality and timely results and to manage change in complex products. Architecture is the cornerstone for containing enterprise frustration and leveraging technology innovations to fulfill the expectations of a viable and dynamic Information Age enterprise.

The world contains entities, processes, locations, people, times, and purposes. Computer systems are filled with bits, bytes, numbers, and the programs that manipulate them. If the computer is to do anything useful, the concrete things in the world must be related to the abstract bits in the computer. Zachman’s framework for information systems architecture (ISA) makes that link. It provides a systematic taxonomy of concepts for relating things in the world to the representations in the computer.

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.

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

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.

Business System Planning (BSP) and Business Information Control Study (BICS) are two information system planning study methodologies that specifically employ enterprise analysis techniques in the course of their analysis. Underlying the BSP and BICS analysis are the data management problems that result from systems design approaches that optimize the management of technology at the expense of managing the data.

The analytical approach employed by both BSP and BISC is "top down". The implications of the words "top down" are multiple and varied, and all apply to these analysis. For instance:

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 yogurt.