Enterprise Architects

An IBM technology professional named John A. Zachman is credited with developing the basic concepts of enterprise architecture (EA) in the 1970s. He published many of his ideas in “A Framework for Information Systems Architecture,” a 1987 article in IBM Systems journal. In the 1990s, he updated his framework and published it as the Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture. The framework soon became an industry standard, although there are other enterprise architecture frameworks.

In the past 10 to 15 years, the vast amounts of data generated and the increasing importance of technology in the successful operation of organizations has prompted many companies, government agencies, and other organizations to hire enterprise architects to manage technology and use it to help their employers achieve a variety of goals.