Zahman's Architectural Framework of the Information System

Article is devoted to the analysis of features of Zahman's architectural framework of the information system. In accordance with the ISO/IEC standard 42010 the architectural framework is defined as "the totality of agreements, principles and practices, used to describe the architecture and applied to a certain subject domain and (or) in the community of specialists (interested persons)." The architectural framework includes description of stakeholders, typical problems's domain, architectural points of view and methods of their integration. Zahman's framework is one of the most old architectural frameworks. It was created by IBM employee John Zachman. The foundation of this framework is taxonomy of system artifacts which involve data, functionality, models, specifications and documents. As a result, we can consider this framework as the top-level ontology which describes a particular system. To build a taxonomy, Zachman proposed to answer six questions about the functioning of the organization: what, how, where, who, why. These questions refer to the following aspects of the system: used data (what?); processes and functions (how?); place of execution of processes (where?); organizations and personalities (who?); control events (when?); goals that determine the work's system (why?). It is necessary to answer these questions with different degree of detail. Six levels of system was described in the article: level of context; level of business descriptions; system level; technological level; technical level; level of the real system. The interested person (stakeholders) and special point of view exists for each level of system: analysts (level of context); top-managers (level of business- descriptions); architects (system level); developers (technological level); administrators (technical level); users (the level of the real system). We made the conclusion that the Zachman framework doesn't allow to explain the dynamics of the behavior of the system its development. Given framework doesn't include the mechanism for monitoring the changes in system