Here’s a zipped pdf of the new 3.0 version of the Zachman Framework (with permission):
ZF3.0.zip [approx 1.5M]. An official version will be posted on
http://www.zachman.com soon. Visit Zachman’s new website for the latest!
Our Editor for BRCommunity.com, Keri Anderson Healy, attended the announcement event – she reports an excellent turnout. The following are some quick first-look notes from Keri (my own comments appear in brackets).
- The Framework has a new subtitle: The Enterprise Ontology (TM). Zachman considered changing the main title word “Framework” to “Ontology” but decided to stay with the former.
[Keri and I both think that was a good decision.]
- Some new terms appear as replacements, aiming to better convey the ‘business’ message. Zachman explains:
“Because I came from an ‘information’ community I had initially used words like ‘data’ in column 1. Big mistake! People thought the Framework was about IT! The first thing people saw was the word ‘data’.
[The Framework has always been about business engineering – that was clear even from the earliest talks I heard Zachman give in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In truth, I would have never guessed it would still be an issue 20+ years later.]
- Faint grey lines now appear crossing column boundaries in a row. These new connections better convey that the Framework supports two kinds of models: engineering (the primitives) and manufacturing (the composites).
The Framework is well-known for its depiction of the engineering primitives (the columns, which are normalized – one thing in one place). The engineering models, however, don’t do anything in and of themselves. The enterprise also needs its manufacturing models – the composites. So these new faint gray lines have been added as a reminder that the composite models also exist and they are also important.
Note: These new faint gray lines are meant as ‘for example’ connections. In this sense they are like the examples shown in the Framework for the primitives in the columns.
- Adjustments have been made to row 6 to better convey what it is about. In early versions of the Framework graphic, row 6 was depicted as just a sliver. It has always been ‘the enterprise’. Row 6 is different in nature from the five rows above it, which are engineering specifications for things in the enterprise, rather than the actual things themselves
- The rows are now color-coded and each cell icon reflects the color theme of its row. At the request of various Framework users, however, the background coloring has been removed from the cells of rows 1-5 so users can annotate their own specifics over the cell graphics.
- For rows 1-5, the color progression is red, orange, yellow, green, blue. Rather than the next-in-series indigo, row 6 is color-coded orange emphasizing that it represents the realization of what row 2 specifies.
[The row 2 / row 6 alignment is consistent with the business-engineering theme that Zachman so ably promotes.]