Rethinking Zachman – replying to Michael Ellyett
Michael Ellyett brought up some very good points in his comments on rethinking Zachman and TOGAF. The reply is going to have to be long, so I’ll put a ‘More’ link in at this point. 🙂
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Rethinking Zachman – a tweak on 'time'
Another perhaps-not-so-minor tweak in rethinking the Zachman columns. My mistake: should have spotted it earlier. Seems that Zachman’s labelling of the ‘When’ column as ‘Time’ is a bit like his description of the ‘Who’ column as ‘People’ – it’s ‘obvious’, …
Responses to 'Rethinking Zachman'
Had a few responses already to this ‘Rethinking Zachman’ set of posts, some of them as comments, others direct by email. Although the emails are obviously personal, and need to remain anonymous unless otherwise indicated, the content of one of …
Rethinking Zachman – a summary
To summarise this overall review of the Zachman framework over the past few posts: The rows or perspectives: Row 0: ‘Universals‘ (Zachman: not present) – core constants to which everything should align Row 1: ‘Scope‘ (Zachman: ‘Planner’) – core entities …
Rethinking Zachman – the 'Why' column
Finally, the last of the amended Zachman columns – the ‘Why‘ column. Zachman describes this column as ‘motivation’, and defines the primitive as ‘ends / means’. That definition would give us problems straight away, because it’s another pseudo-primitive: not ‘Why’ …
Rethinking Zachman – the 'When' column
Next on the stack in the set of amended Zachman columns – the ‘When‘ column. Unlike the original ‘Who’ column, which (IMHO) was just plain wrong, the problems with Zachman’s definition for this column – ‘time / cycle’ – are …
Rethinking Zachman – the 'Who' column
Next in the columns of the amended Zachman framework is ‘Who‘. Presumptuous of me, perhaps, but from my understanding of what the framework is aiming to achieve, this is one place where Zachman made a serious mistake in his taxonomy, …
Rethinking Zachman – the 'Where' column
Next column to the right on the amended Zachman framework is ‘Where‘. Zachman describes this as ‘node / line’, and “the locations relevant to the organisation”, which is fair enough as long as we expand the meaning of ‘node’, ‘location’ …
Rethinking Zachman – the 'How' column
Moving onward across the amended Zachman framework, the next column is ‘How‘. Zachman describes this as ‘process / input-output’, but again this is somewhat misleading. The true primitive here is function, in the mathematical sense. In other words something is …
Rethinking Zachman – the 'What' column
Expanding on the previous post on the overall set of Zachman columns, let’s rethink the detail of each framework column, starting with ‘What‘. Zachman describes the ‘What’ column as data, or more generally as ‘entity / relationship‘. To make this …