John Zachman

John A. Zachman (born December 16, 1934) is an American business and IT consultant, early pioneer of enterprise architecture, chief executive officer of Zachman International (Zachman.com), and originator of the Zachman Framework.

Biography Zachman holds a degree in Chemistry from Northwestern University. He served for a number of years as a line officer in the United States Navy, and is a retired Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve.

He joined IBM Corporation in 1964 and held various marketing-related positions in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. He became involved with Strategic Information Planning methodologies in 1970. and in 1973 he was assigned responsibility for the Business Systems Planning (BSP) program in IBM’s Western Region. In 1984 he began to concentrate on information systems architecture. In 1989 at IBM he joined the CASE Support organization of the Application Enabling Marketing Center, where he worked as a consultant in areas of information systems planning and enterprise architecture. He was awarded the 2004 Oakland University, Applied Technology in Business (ATIB), Award for IS Excellence and Innovation. and worked on their Executive team planning techniques (Intensive Planning). In 1987 he originated the Zachman Framework a standard for classifying the descriptive representations (models) that comprise enterprise architecture.

Business Systems Planning Business System Planning (BSP) is a method for analyzing, defining and designing an information architecture of organizations. It was first issued by IBM in 1981, though the initial work on BSP began in the early 1970s. At first, it was for IBM internal use only. Later it was made available to customers are both "information system planning methodologies that specifically employ enterprise analysis techniques in the course of their analyses. Underlying the BSP and BICS analyses 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 methodologies have similarities and differences, and strengths and weaknesses. The "choice between using one or the other methodology is strongly influenced by the immediate intent of the study sponsor, tempered by the limiting factors currently surrounding the BICS methodology".

According to Zachman, "this ontology was derived from analogous structures that are found in the older disciplines of Architecture/Construction and Engineering/Manufacturing that classify and organize the design artifacts created in the process of designing and producing complex physical products (e.g. buildings or airplanes). It uses a two dimensional classification model based on the six basic interrogatives (What, How, Where, Who, When, and Why) intersecting six distinct perspectives, which relate to stakeholder groups (Planner, Owner, Designer, Builder, Implementer and Worker). The intersecting cells of the Framework correspond to models which, if documented, can provide a holistic view of the enterprise".

Publications Zachman had published three books, several articles and forewords to more than a hundred books on related subjects. A selection: 1997. Data stores, data warehousing, and the Zachman Framework : managing enterprise knowledge. With Bill Inmon and Jonathan G. Geiger. New York : McGraw-Hill. 2002. The Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture : A Primer on Enterprise Engineering and Manufacturing. 2016. "The Complete Business Process Handbook, Volume 2: Extended Business Process Management with Mark von Rosing & Henrik von Scheel, et al. (Morgan Kaufmann, )

Articles: 1978. "The Information Systems Management System: A Framework for Planning". In: DATA BASE 9(3): pp. 8–13. 1982. "Business Systems Planning and Business Information Control Study: A comparisment. In: IBM Systems Journal, vol 21, no 3, 1982. p. 31-53. 1987. "A Framework for Information Systems Architecture". In: IBM Systems Journal, vol. 26, no. 3, 1987. IBM Publication G321-5298. 1992. "Extending and Formalizing the Framework for Information Systems Architecture" with John F. Sowa In: IBM Systems Journal, Vol 31, no.3, 1992. p. 590-616 2007. "Architecture Is Architecture Is Architecture" . Paper Zachman International ( version).