Building Transition Architectures Uusing Zachman Framework

During recent years, IT strategic planning has been used in an excessive way, in order to provide a brief efficient way to develop IT environment within organizations. Some methodologies have been introduced for IT planning since the concept is well known. In general, this plan is a definition of all systems and sub-systems, priority to develop those systems and an estimation of cost and time needed to perform essential projects. Since the latter half of 1990s, managers are being familiar with another interesting concept named Enterprise Architecture. This concept mainly comes from Zachman framework for information systems architecture. Enterprise architecture is a collection of models defining enterprise's IT environment aligned with the business in such a way that both current and target requirements will be met well enough.Enterprise architecture is considered to have up-to three time-phased architectures. Major deliverable of an IT strategic plan seems to be similar to those, which must be found within a transition architecture that is one of those three architectures. Although transition plans are so popular upon IT strategic plans, the idea of transition architectures is not yet realized. Having transition architectures guarantees updatability and maintainability of migrations as well as making it easier to track the migration. In this paper, it is shown that how transition plans may be become transition architectures using Zachman framework. In such a way, we will have transition architecture instead of a simple transition plan. Having this kind of transition architecture, not only the enterprise will benefit from advantages of enterprise architecture, but also a measure for comparing and ranking different IT strategic plans will be gained. Furthermore those who have already built their IT strategic plans could guess how much work is needed to convert them into transition architectures.

Keywords:

IT Strategic Planning , Zachman Framework , Transition Architecture , Migration Plan , Enterprise Architecture