Clear communication is of the utmost importance in the modern business environment. For a project to be successful, every stakeholder involved needs to have a precise and unambiguous understanding of the process and business requirements.
A concept model provides a way for business analysts to communicate the knowledge of their domain using the established business vocabulary.
Table of Contents
What is a Concept Model?
A concept model is a way of organising and structuring a business vocabulary so that the operational know-how of a domain can be communicated clearly, thoroughly, and consistently. The basis of a concept model is a glossary that defines the core noun concepts of a specific knowledge domain. It provides a semantic blueprint for supporting all the relevant business communication such as business needs and requirements that are commonly highly complex.
The IIBA BABOK guide
defines the concept model as follows:
A concept model is used to organise the business vocabulary needed to consistently and thoroughly communicate the knowledge of a domain.
A good concept model should focus on rich vocabulary consisting of high-quality and reliant definitions that are free of abundant terminology and untainted by any technical, data, or implementation bias.
The purpose of a concept model is to recognise the right terms to be used in communication during business analysis. This is particularly important on knowledge-intensive projects where it’s crucial to make precise and subtle distinctions. At the same time, concept models allow for clear communication and understanding without the need to use technical models, such as entity-relationship or class diagrams.
Concept modes are useful for organisations looking to work on their core knowledge by organising, managing, communicating, and building on it. They help capture large numbers of business rules and remove the resistance among the stakeholders about the perceived technical language of data models, class diagrams, and similar instruments.
The Components of a Concept Model
Concept models feature three main elements for structuring:
- Nouns.
- Verbs.
- Other connections:
- Categorisations.
- Classifications.
- Partitive or Whole. Part Connections.
- Properties.
Nouns
A noun is the simplest and the most basic concept of the concept model. Noun concepts are considered as a “given” and are the easiest to spot, for example, “order; or ‘author”.
Verbs
Similar to syntax in linguistics, verb concepts serve to provide the link between noun concepts. By themselves, verb concepts are rarely sentences. Rather, they can be used as building blocks for the definition statements such as business rules and, thus, must have standard wordings, leaving no room for ambiguous interpretation. Often they play a role in deriving new information and knowledge from basic facts as they can be built, inferred, or computed by definitional rules.
Other Connections
As concept models are used to support the semantic definition which is usually complex and rich in meaning, it’s necessary to use not only verb concepts but also other types of standard connections. Some of them are:
- Categorisations – Category represents a type or variation within a more general concept. Categorisations are in form of “(Class of thing1) is a category of (class of thing2).” For example, a retail customer is a category of a customer.
- Classifications – Concept modelling identifies and defines classes of things that are essential for business operations. Businesses often can’t predict which instances will be the class of things, for example, the classes of their future customers. However, in income cases, the instances for classes are relatively stable. Classification represents the connection between an instance and its particular class of things. Its general form is ” (Instance) is classified as a (class of thing).” For example, France is a country.
- Partitive or Whole Part Connections – Partitive or composition connections refer to cases when a thing is made of several other kinds of things. Defining the terminology and composition of such partitive structures is often very useful for describing business operations and relations. Partitive connections come in form of “(whole) is composed of (parts) or (part) is included in (whole).” For example, a car is composed of a body, wheels, and engine.
- Properties – Properties point to qualities belonging to a certain thing or a person. Their general form is “(thing1) has (thing2).” For example, an employee has an employee name or order has a date promised.
Difference Between a Concept Model and Data Model
It’s important to make a distinction between the concept model and the data model.
The IIBA BABOK guide defines a data model as follows:
A data model describes the entities, classes or data objects relevant to a domain, the attributes that are used to describe them, and the relationships among them to provide a common set of semantics for analysis and implementation.
The concept model helps the expression of natural-language statements and supplies them with semantic meaning. They don’t deal with data in terms of unifying, simplifying or codifying it. The vocabulary of concept models is tailored to suit complex and knowledge-intensive domains, so it’s much richer.
In most cases, concept models are represented graphically just like data models. The typical representation of a concept model is a relationship diagram, while data models use entity relationship diagrams or ERDs. However, they are devoid of distractions to business stakeholders which may make them less understandable to someone outside of the knowledge domain. So, concept models are more business-friendly of the two. Data models commonly require knowledge of notions and some IT background.
While concept models revolve around concepts, data models are centred around things, entities, and classes. It’s often easy to create a data model based on a concept model. The reverse, or deriving concept model from the data model, is, more or less, impossible.
Advantages of a Concept Model
Using concept models can deliver significant benefits to the organisation and to the business operation.
- Provides stakeholders
with an instrument to communicate in a clear and unambiguous way. - Doesn’t have the biases of data design and features a far richer vocabulary compared to data models.
- Provides support for knowledge-rich, complex, and decision-laden business operations.
- Ensures cohesively, consistency, and clarity of large numbers of business rules, decisions, and definitions.
What are some of the Limitations of Concept Modelling?
While they’re hugely beneficial for business processes, concept models still have some limitations when it comes to their implementation.
- May lead organisations to have too high expectations about possible levels of integration based on business semantics in a relatively short period.
- Designing a concept model requires some special skills not all business analysts possess. To create a concept model, a business analyst must be able to think about knowledge and know-how in a non-procedural and abstract way.
- The focus on knowledge and rules may feel foreign and unnatural to certain stakeholders.
- In order to support the use of business terminology in writing business definitions, requirements, rules, and other business communication forms, concept models often require active and real-time re-tooling.
Conclusion – Concept Model
A business analyst should make themselves familiar with the understanding of a concept model.
The concept model technique is used to organise the business vocabulary needed to consistently and thoroughly communicate the knowledge of a domain.
Concept models can help when specifying business rules or writing very specific unambiguous requirements.