A framework for decision support systems based on Zachman framework

Abstract

Recent challenges have brought about an inevitable tendency for enterprises to lunge towards organizing their information activities in a comprehensive way. In this respect, Enterprise Architecture (EA) has proven to be the leading option for development and maintenance of information systems. EA clearly provides a thorough outline of the whole information system comprising an enterprise. To establish such an outline, a logical framework needs to be laid upon the entire information system. Zachman framework (ZF) has been widely accepted as a standard scheme for identifying and organizing descriptive representations that have critical roles in enterprise management and system development. In this paper, we propose a framework based on ZF for Decision Support Systems (DSS). Furthermore, a modeling approach based on Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) is utilized to obtain compatible models for all cells in the framework. The efficiency of the proposed framework is examined through a case study. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.