What is the Zachman Framework?

If you are fairly new the business analysis world or if you have been in it for a while, you have heard and been puzzled by the zachman framework. This framework is described in the BABOK(TM) by IIBA as one of the techniques to create and maintain the business architecture (of the activity of the Enterprise Analysis Knowledge Area).

The Zachman framework was developed by John Zachman in 1987. When designing this framework, John made our jobs as BA much easier. The BA job is to liase between different groups or players during the SDLC. In order to effectively do this, the BA must understand what everyone has to bring to the table. Not only does the Zachman Framework helps frame an enterprise architecture, but it can also helps bring out the different components needed to successfully go through the development process. It a cheat sheet of stakeholder's perspectives.

It is composed of 6 rows and 6 columns. The rows represent the different stakeholders and the columns represent the areas of perspectives.

The stakeholder representes in the rows are:

1. Planner: This stakeholder is responsible for definining the enterprise direction, purpose and boundaries.

2. Business Owner: This stakeholder is responsible for definining the business structure, processes, and how it is organized.

3. Architect: This stakeholder takes what the business owner has defined and further refine them into actionable functions

4. Designer: Once the architect defines functions, the designer looks at what and how technology will be used to support those functions.

5. Builder: The builder is the one who makes things happen. At this level, the information captured is very detailed. They use technology to build the necessary tools to support the functions using the technology selected by the designers

6. Working Systems: Here we look at integration and the needs of the system.

The perspectives captured in the Zachman are:

1. Data (What): deals with things that are important to the enterprise

2. Activities (How): is concerned with what the enterprise does to support itself

3. Locations (Where): is the geographic distribution of enterprise's activities, assets... etc

4. People (Who): deals with people involved in the business and new initiatives

5. Time (When): captures all aspect of time such as: business events, triggers, schedules... etc

6. Motivation (Why): translation of business goals and strategies into smaller actions

This approach gives those in IT a view into the business and vice versa. It also guides the type of deliverable needed from each stakeholder in order to fulfil the strategy of the business.

The Zachman Framework isn't the only framework that organizes enterprise information. To get a better understanding of the Zachman and other existing framework, MITRE is putting together a Enterprise Analysis Body of Knowledge that defines, explains, and compares different frameworks.