Saturday 29 August 2009

Zachman Framework

  • One of the popular frameworks originated at IBM and is called the Zachman Framework. The Zachman Framework predated the popularity of object orientation and took the perspective of separating data from process.
  • The Zachman Framework formed a matrix of architectural descriptions that are also organized in terms of levels.
    • There are five levels of description above the information system implementation.
    • They range from architectural planning done by individual programmers at the finest grain to the overall enterprise requirements from the investors' perspective of the information system.
    • In total, the Zachman Framework identifies thirty architectural specifications, which provide a complete description of the information system. In practice, no real-world project is capable of creating these thirty or more detailed plans and keeping them all in synchronization.
    • When the Zachman Framework is applied, systems architects partition the viewpoint into various categories and create architectural specifications that cover some or all of the different Zachman descriptions without having to create the large number of individual specification documents that the Zachman Framework spans.

No comments: