Enterprise Architecture (intro)

Been reading up on this. Project for a company has me designing large scale solution. Last year with Bill I spent quite abit of time looking at this area of our industry and learned alot. The thing that made the most sense to me out of everything I learned was the Zachman Framework. A little research into the history of EA shows that Zachman's was one of the earliest frameworks out there and is still going strong. I find this easy to believe since it is grounded in common sense. A quick introduction to Zachman Framework:

• It is a 6x6 grid made up of key questions along the top and domains on the left.  

The Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture is a diagram that depicts  the intersection between two classifications. The first is the fundamentals of communication found in the primitive questions: What, How, When, Who, Where, and Why. The second involves the breakdown of an abstract idea into an instantiation and these are labled: Identification, Definition, Representation, Specification, Configuration and Instantiation.  A quick look on Wikipedia shows that the questions along the top are almost always consistent but those going down are usually tailored somewhat to words that provide clearer meaning to the domain being architected, for example one that I saw had the common questions along the top and down they had:  Scope,  Enterprise Model, System Model, Technology Model, Detailed Representation, and finally Functioning System.  You can see these are synonyms if you will for the above words (ie. Scope=Identification and Functioning System=Instantiation.

Gotta run...more thoughts on EA soon :)  Hopefully a little more complete than this one.........