Organizations are increasingly aware of the need to develop integrated models of their business in order to remain competitive and flexible to change. Interest in industry-accepted enterprise architecture (EA) frameworks, such as the Zachman framework, has grown steadily. By using the appropriate conventions and views, you can create models of complex system architectures to comply with the framework specifications that describe operational environments and their components.

System Architect^® is a comprehensive and powerful modeling solution geared toward the development of enterprise architecture frameworks. The modeling environment provides all the tools necessary for development of successful enterprise systems. All functionality is available within the extensible repository.

To make navigating and viewing all of these models easier from a framework perspective, the new System Architect^® Framework Manager has been introduced, which contains a Framework Browser and Editor.

The Framework Browser enables you to view and access the models and artifacts you have developed in a System Architect^® encyclopedia through a framework interface. Each cell of the framework (below) can be opened, to view a filtered browser list of all diagrams and definitions in the encyclopedia that pertain to that cell of the framework.

Users can use predefined, industry accepted, frameworks such as the Zachman Framework or the US Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF – more commonly known as the C4ISR framework) that are provided by System Architect^®.

Users or administrators can also create their own frameworks using the Framework Editor. This enables organizations to develop frameworks to support their own way of working.

The following image shows an example of a framework browser supporting the Zachman Framework, created using the Framework Editor.

The implementation of a framework provides the following benefits: