Yes, yes, but what do you do?

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I’ve tried explaining my job as an Enterprise Architect to a number of people, including my parents, and after I’m done I get that “sure, whatever you say” kind of a look.

I’ll not delve into my job description here, except to say that a s…

The Project Business Model Profile

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This post is the second in a series of ten about real life experiences of using business model thinking as a foundation for planning and delivering change. Writing this post I’ve had the help of a true friend and admirable colleague (Eva Kammerfors) whom I’ve shared many of the referred to business model experiences with. […]

The Project Business Model

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This post is about real life experiences of using business model thinking as a foundation for planning and delivering change. The collection of these experiences have been a long slow journey started out in the early 90′s, experimenting with creating small businesses. During the last six years experiences from the field and theory has accelerated […]

Frameworks and rigour

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This is in response to the recent article of Richard Veryard “Arguing with Mendeleev”. There he comments on Zachman’s comparison of his framework with the periodic table of Mendeleev. And indeed there are cells in both tables with labelled columns (called “groups” in Mendeleev’s) and rows (“periods” respectively). Another similarity is that both deal with […]

For What It’s Worth

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We live in a world where the rate of change, the sources of change and the potential impact of change is greater than it ever was before. Strategic decisions have to be taken in the face of a considerable degree of uncertainty, so we have to learn the …

Organizational Models for Social Business

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Here we go with the third (and last) blog in this series which looks at some underlying theory about organization and management. In the social business context I consider the most significant approach to be Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model (VSM). The VSM has two central concepts. The first is feedback, which enables an organization to constantly learn […]

Hybrid architectures

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In the first post about my first app, I quoted Tim Berners-Lee, who says “every single web page out there, if you like, is like a computer” with reference to HTML5. I took one single HTML5 web page and turned it into something “like a computer”, namely an app. I mentioned that Gartner talks about hybrid architecture, which “combines the portability of HTML5 […]

Complexity from Big Data and Cloud Trends Makes Architecture Tools like ArchiMate and TOGAF More Powerful, Says Expert Panel

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We recently assembled a panel of Enterprise Architecture (EA) experts to explain how such simultaneous and complex trends as big data, Cloud Computing, security, and overall IT transformation can be helped by the combined strengths of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF®) and the ArchiMate® modeling language. … Continue reading →

Arguing with Mendeleev

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@JohnZachman insists that his classification scheme is fixed—it is not negotiable. Comparing his Zachman Framework with the periodic table originally developed by Dmitri Mendeleev, he says, “You can’t argue with Mendeleev that he forgot a column in the periodic table”.

Well, actually, you can. If you look at the Wikipedia article on the Periodic Table, you can see the difference between Mendeleev’s original version and the modern version. Modern chemists now use a periodic table with 18 columns. As Wikipedia states, “Mendeleev’s periodic table has since been expanded and refined with the discovery or synthesis of further new elements and the development of new theoretical models to explain chemical behavior.”

What makes chemistry a science is precisely the fact that the periodic table is open to this kind of revision in the light of experimental discovery and improved theory. If the same isn’t true for the Zachman Framework, then it can hardly claim to be a proper science.

Some observers have noted that early versions of the Zachman Framework had fewer columns, and see this as a sign that the number of columns may be variable and open to discovery. But the Zachmanites reject this; they say that the six columns have always existed, it was just that the early presentations didn’t mention them all. “Humanity for the last 7,000 years has been able to work with what, how, who, where, when, and why.” (This sounds like a Just-So-Story – “How the Enterprise Architect Got His Toolset”)

Mr Zachman has a degree in chemistry, so he ought to understand what makes the Periodic table different from his own framework. However, some of his followers are less cautious in their claims. I found an article by one Sunil Dutt Jha, whose “proof” of the scientific nature of EA seemed to rely on two key facts (1) that Mendeleev transformed alchemy into chemistry by creating the periodic table, and (2) that the Zachman framework looks a bit like the periodic table, therefore (3) EA must be a science too.

An earlier version of this comment was posted on Linked-In Is it true to say that “Enterprise Architecture” is a scientific basis for creating, maintaining and running an Enterprise?

Erecting the Framework (Feb 2004) – John Zachman discussing his Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture in an interview with Dan Ruby

John P. Zachman, The Zachman Framework Evolution (2009-2011)

Sunil Dutt Jha, Biggest myth – “Enterprise Architecture is a discipline aimed at creating models” (January 2013)

See also 

Richard Veryard, Satiable curtiosity (September 2009)

Alan Wall, Pattern Recognition and the Periodic Table (March 2013)


Link added 24 March 2013