Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Listening to Zachman

I must tell you this. I had the opportunity to attend Zachman's conference held in Bangalore yesterday. It was a great event that I had a chance to meet one of the enterprise architecture legends of our time and listen to him directly about his framework and viewpoints. At the end of the day, my belief and conviction on the concept of having an architecture was only re-inforced.

First of all, Hats-off to him for driving this concept of EA for the past 2 decades are so. Almost anybody and everybody in IT who is working on EA cannot ignore the work of Zachman. From that perspective, Zachman's effort is a significant contribution towards IT maturity and its truly an effort that is made towards advancing the state of the art (IT).

Some of the quick observations:
1. The framework has in't changed for so many years. There are no significant updates to the framework in the last few years. It means, the framework has stood the test of times.
2. The IT complexity has never reduced, 2 decades back or now. There is lot of stuff happening on Technology evolution. But, what about Engineering maturity?.
3. As I anticipated, Zachman has a different viewpoint about SOA. He said he would like to call it as Service-Oriented Implementation rather tha Service-Oriented Architecture
4. Inspite of his work all these years, he is still not hopeful that EA will mature and be implemented in all corporates proactively. He said it may take another 20 years or so...:-(
5. Another valid point, EA is thought about only when the company is in a Titanic situation. And that would be too late to prepare anything.

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