He served for a number of years as a line officer in the United States Navy, and is a retired Commander in the U.S.

In 1989 at IBM he joined the CASE Support organization of the Application Enabling Marketing Center, where he worked as a consultant in areas of information systems planning and enterprise architecture.

In 1987 he originated the Zachman Framework a standard for classifying the descriptive representations (models) that comprise enterprise architecture.

Business System Planning (BSP) is a method for analyzing, defining and designing an information architecture of organizations.

It uses a two dimensional classification model based on the six basic interrogatives (What, How, Where, Who, When, and Why) intersecting six distinct perspectives, which relate to stakeholder groups (Planner, Owner, Designer, Builder, Implementer and Worker).

The intersecting cells of the Framework correspond to models which, if documented, can provide a holistic view of the enterprise".