We've been having a great GovEA Conference this year- no shortage of good speakers, exhibits and vendors.

I had the distinct pleasure of introducing my long-time friend and colleague, Scott Bernard who has been the U.S. Federal Chief Enterprise Architect for the last several years.

Architecture Is Not a New IdeaThe ideas about Architecture have been around for a long time. In the old days we used to call this kind of thing "Enterprise Analysis." The whole concept of Enterprise Analysis was, or is, you try to understand the Enterprise first, before you try to overlay infrastructure kinds of things against it. 

Peter Drucker points out that that this is not the first Information Revolution, this is "The NEXT Information Revolution,"(1) the fourth Information Revolution.

I recently ran across some notes I took from a presentation at an IBM SHARE Conference, August 1991 that may shed some light on the idea of Professionalism. 

 The advent of the commercial employment of computers in the 1950's ushered in an era of dramatic productivity improvements in both the private and public sectors. Clearly, using a computer to perform the processes of the business rather than people performing the processes is better because computers do things the same way every time whereas people make mistakes, computers perform in electrical (or electronic) cycle times and people in human cycle times and computers (in most cases) are cheaper than labor.

The common perception (or more appropriately, mis-perception) of Enterprise Architecture in the general marketplace today is that it is one of an Information Technology (IT), model-building exercise. There is validity to that perception because, in order to engineer the Enterprise, the engineering design artifacts (the descriptive representations of the Enterprise) have to be created as they are the "raw material" for doing engineering work and the IT community seems to have the skills to produce those engineering design artifacts. 

It is useful to discuss the differences between Primitives and Composites because this is the paradigmatic problem of the Information community of the day. 

After 30 years of talking about this, I am still shocked at the predominant misconception that the Rows of Zachman Framework define "level of detail," or "waterfall," or "decomposition." This is just not true. The Rows of the Zachman Framework define TRANSFORMATION, NOT decomposition. Level of detail is defined in the HEIGHT of each cell (or Row), NOT the height of the Framework itself. While I originally I called the Rows "Perspectives," the underlying theory that defines the Rows is the philosophical concept of Reification. 

I was asked by a PhD student to fill out a survey for research he was doing about the Enterprise Architecture Frameworks. This is a typical question I get, and it is no wonder because of the confusion about the word "Framework." Just because Enterprise Architect Frameworks have the word "Framework" in their titles, it doesn't mean you can compare the Zachman Framework with them. The Zachman Framework is the ontology. The other frameworks are METHODOLOGICAL frameworks, and the artifacts you create by following those methodologies potentially can be mapped back onto the Zachman Framework Ontology. 

OThe Framework is the Ontology

I have no idea where people get the idea that the Zachman Framework requires any documentation at all. The Zachman Framework is an ontology – the theory of the existence of essential components of an enterprise (actually, of anything) that warrant description in order to successfully create it, operate it or change it. Whether any or all of those components are described (documented, made explicit) is a function of a methodology and the choice of the Enterprise… not a requirement of the Framework.

I have been working in the area of Enterprise Architecture for 40 years and people have been telling me (and are still telling me) the reasons why they think it is impossible to do Enterprise Architecture. I think I have distilled these reasons down to five basic objections. Let me enumerate their objections before I explain why these objections exist and why they are completely unfounded. 

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I am very excited about the new developments in The Zachman Framework 3.0 and Zachman International! We have spent the last couple years "underground" refining our research, developing several new programs, forging new relationships, developing the community of practice and getting zachman.com ready for prime time! Well, the time is finally here to start rolling these things out!