Roger Evernden

Roger Evernden (born ca. 1954) is a British enterprise architect and consultant at the Cutter Consortium, known as author of the Information FrameWork, an enterprise architecture framework presented in 1996 as more generic alternative to the Zachman Framework.

Biography

Evernden received his BA in History at the Lancaster University in 1975, and a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education at the Goldsmiths' College of the University of London in 1977.

Evernden started his career as history teacher in London in 1977. In 1980 he started working in IT as analyst and programmer, and worked his way up from consultant and application developer to enterprise architect working for companies as Legal & General, IBM, Westpac Banking Corporation, and smaller companies. From 2007 to 2011 he was Enterprise Domain Architect and later Enterprise Architect at Lloyds Bank. Since 2011 he is Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's Business & Enterprise Architecture practice,

Work

Information FrameWork (IFW)

In the late 1980s Evernden developed Information FrameWork (IFW) to describe an enterprise architect initiative at Westpac. This was later described in an IBM Systems Journal article, published in 1996. The Westpac project - known internally as CS90, or Core Systems for the 1990s - was a prototype for using enterprise architecture to create adaptive organizations or adaptive systems. The Westpac experience was described by Stephan H. (Steve) Haeckel - an American management theorist and former director of Strategic Studies at IBM’s Advanced Business Institute - who developed the idea of the sense-and-respond organization as an adaptive enterprise.

The Information FrameWork (IFW) was presented in 1996 as framework for Information management, and more generic alternative to the Zachman Framework. Evernden (1996) explained:

the objectives and scope of IFW are broader than that of the original Zachman framework. IFW is described and compared with the original Zachman structure, showing the evolution, changes, and the rationale behind the changes based on experiences from within the financial services industry.

In his 1996 paper Evernden also showed "how the structure of IFW has been populated by industry-wide models and supported by a distinctive methodology. A detailed discussion of each of the six dimensions of the IFW architecture is presented."

Other works

Evernden is co-author, with Elaine Evernden, of Information First: Integrating Knowledge and Information Architecture for Business Advantage, which was first published in 2003, expanding the concepts of Information FrameWork (IFW). Information First outlines an approach to enterprise architecture that uses eight factors common to all enterprise architecture frameworks that can be combined to create architectural tools for managing enterprise and business transformation.

In 2008, at the height of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, he spoke about how enterprise architecture could be used to weather unpredictable events. In 2011 he described the architectural approach to create a single integrated IT platform from two heritage banking systems following the Lloyds TSB acquisition of HBOS to form Lloyds Banking Group January 2009.

Selected publications

• Evernden, Roger. "The information framework." BM Systems Journal 35.1 (1996): 37-68.
• Elaine Evernden, Roger Evernden. Information First. Elsevier, 2003/2012.
• Evernden, Roger, and Elaine Evernden. "Third-generation information architecture." Communications of the ACM 46.3 (2003): 95-98.
• Evernden, R. Mastering Complexity to Drive EA Productivity, Cutter Consortium Executive Report, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2013