John Zachman presents a lecture at the University of Pretoria

Posted on June 08, 2018

The University of Pretoria was privileged to have John Zachman as a speaker at an event co-hosted with the EACF (http://www.enterprisearchitecture.co.za/) at the University of Pretoria on 7 June 2018. John Zachman is often hailed as the father of Enterprise Architecture (EA) due to his contribution to the EA discipline of nearly four decades. His original Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture (ZFEA) was developed in the ‘80s from a systems engineering approach (Zachman 1987) and is often regarded as a fundamental cornerstone of the EA discipline. John Zachman’s contribution as thought leader regarding modern technology is compared with those of Ed Yourdon and Grace Hopper (Inmon 2016).

John started his presentation with the Business Agility Manifesto, empasizing the need for enterprise agility just to survive the increasing rate of change, evolving external ecosystems and business complexity (Burlton et al. 2017). Enterprise Architectre is the one fundamental activity that businesses should adopt in order to become agile, because EA allows us to understand the business and understand how to react to change and reengineer the business successfully.  The ZFEA has as primary goal the specification of a universal set of descriptive representations from different views for enterprises as socio-technical systems. 

As always, one is humbled when listening to John’s presentations. Even though he is nearly 84 years old, he remains an engaging speaker with such a passion for EA and the need for the ZFEA that the audience is always spellbound. 

More resources:

  • The Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture: https://www.zachman.com/about-the-zachman-framework
  • Business Agility Manifesto: https://busagilitymanifesto.org/ 

Many thanks to the other sponsors, Moyo and Wesbank, for contributing to John’s visit to South Africa.

 

References

Ahlemann, F., Stettiner, E., Messerschmidt, M., and Legner, C. (eds.). 2012. Strategic Enterprise Architecture Management, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24223-6). 

Inmon, B. 2016. “Mount Rushmore of Technology.” (https://www.zachman.com/resource/ea-articles/339-mount-rushmore-of-technology-by-bill-inmon). 

Burlton, R. T., Ross, R. G., and Zachman, J. A. 2017. “The Business Agility Manifesto.” (https://busagilitymanifesto.org/). 

Lapalme, J. 2012. “Three Schools of Thought on Enterprise Architecture,” IT Professional (14:6), pp. 37–43. (https://doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2011.109). 

Zachman, J. 1987. “A Framework for Information Systems Architecture,” IBM Systems Journal (26(3)), pp. 276–292. 

Zachman, J. A. 2016. “The Framework for Enterprise Architecture: Background, Description and Utility by: John A. Zachman,” Zachman International | Enterprise Architecture. (https://www.zachman.com/resources/ea-articles-reference/327-the-framework-for-enterprise-architecture-background-description-and-utility-by-john-a-zachman, accessed May 24, 2018).

- Author Prof Alta van der Merwe

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