Concept Modelling: Achieving Visual Clarity
Concept modelling is a business analysis technique that helps to create a visual representation of the key concepts and relationships in a domain. It sounds boring, right? Well, it doesn’t have to be, learn to create your own concept models and impress your stakeholders with your creativity and clarity.

Hello fellow BAs, and Welcome Back for another technique in the series Business Analysis Techniques.
What is Concept Modelling?
Concept modeling is a business analysis technique that helps to create a visual representation of the concepts and relationships in a domain. A concept is an abstract idea or category that represents something meaningful in the domain. Concept Modelling is a way of representing the nouns and verbs that are important for the business, as well as their relationships and meanings. Concept modeling can help business analysts create clear and consistent definitions, avoid ambiguities and misunderstandings, and communicate effectively with stakeholders.
Concept modeling is different from data modeling or class modeling, which are more technical and focus on the structure and design of data or information. Concept modeling is more semantic and linguistic, and it aims to capture the language and logic of the business. Concept modeling does not depend on any specific notation or tool, but it can be presented graphically or textually, depending on the preferences and needs of the audience.
What is included in the Concept Modeling?
Concept modeling typically involves three elements: noun concepts, verb concepts, and other connections.
Noun concepts are the main entities or things that are relevant to the domain, such as “Order”, “Customer”, “Product”, etc. Verb concepts are the associations or actions that link the noun concepts, such as “places”, “buys”, “sells”, etc. Other connections are additional types of relationships that can help to clarify the meaning and scope of the concepts, such as classifications, roles, parts, positions, etc.
For example, a concept model for an online bookstore might include the following noun concepts: Book, Author, Publisher, Genre, Customer, Order, Payment, etc. The verb concepts might include: writes, publishes, belongs to, places, pays for, receives, etc. The other connections might include: Book is a type of Product, Author is a role of Person, Order has one or more Books, etc.
How to create a Concept Model?
There are different methods and tools for creating a concept model, but here are some general steps that can be followed:
Identify the purpose and scope of the concept model
What problem or opportunity are business analysts trying to understand or communicate? What are the boundaries of the domain? Who are the stakeholders and what are their needs and expectations? What level of detail do business analysts need?
Identify the key concepts in the domain
What are the main entities or ideas that are relevant or important to the domain? Use Brainstorming, Interviews, Surveys, Document Analysis or other techniques to elicit the concepts.
Identify the relationships between your concepts
How are your concepts connected or related to each other? What kind of relationships do they have? You can use natural language, logic, rules, or patterns to define the relationships.
Draw the concept model using symbols and labels
Use different shapes, colors, sizes, and fonts to represent the concepts and relationships. Different types of shapes such as circles, boxes, arrows, or other shapes can be used to show the directionality and cardinality of the relationships. Different colors, fonts, icons, or other visual elements also can be used to enhance the readability and aesthetics of the model. Business Analysts can use any tool that they are comfortable with, such as paper and pencil, whiteboard and markers, or software applications.
Validate and refine the concept model with stakeholders
Feedback, Testing, Evaluation, or other methods can be adopted to check the accuracy, completeness, and clarity of the model. The model can be revised as an understanding of the domain evolves.
Strengths of Concept Modelling
Some of the strengths of this technique are:
- It provides a formal and precise way of communicating with stakeholders about the domain knowledge and the business rules.
- It is free of technical biases and constraints, and it reflects the natural language and terminology of the business.
- It is useful for complex, knowledge-intensive, or rule-based domains that require clear definitions and logic.
- It helps to ensure that the business rules and decisions are transparent and consistent.
- It helps to discover and define the key concepts and relationships in a domain.
- It helps to identify gaps, inconsistencies, ambiguities, or conflicts in a domain.
- It is reusable and modular, enabling the reuse of existing models or parts of models across different projects or domains.
Limitations of Concept Modelling
Like every technique, Concept Modelling also has some limitations:
- It may create unrealistic expectations about the feasibility or implementation of the solution.
- It requires abstract and conceptual thinking skills that may not be common or comfortable for some stakeholders.
- It needs to be updated and maintained regularly to keep up with the changes in the business vocabulary and logic.
- It may not capture all the nuances, details, or dynamics of the domain.
- It may not reflect the perspectives, preferences, or expectations of all the stakeholders.
- It may not account for the changes, uncertainties, or risks in the domain.
- It may not be compatible with other models, tools, or standards that are used in the domain.
- It can be difficult to decide how much detail or complexity to include in the concept model.
- It can be difficult to choose the right symbols and labels for the concepts and relationships.
Real-Life Examples of Concept Modelling
Concept models can be applied to any domain that involves concepts and relationships. Here are some examples of concept models from different domains:
- Online learning platforms for a university can use concept modeling to identify the main entities and relationships involved in the learning process, such as courses, modules, assessments, instructors, students, etc. Concept Modelling can help to define the scope and requirements of the platform and to communicate them to the developers and testers.
- To analyze the customer data and segmentation in a bank, concept modeling can be used to represent the different types of customers and their attributes, such as demographics, preferences, behaviors, etc. This can help to understand the customer profiles and needs and to recommend strategies for marketing and retention.
- To develop a new mobile app for a travel agency, concept modeling can depict the various features and functions of the app, such as booking, searching, reviewing, etc., and help to prioritize the functionalities and user stories and design the user interface and user experience.
As we can see, concept modeling is a very powerful technique that can help a business analyst in many ways.
It can help to create clear and consistent definitions, avoid ambiguities and misunderstandings, and communicate effectively with stakeholders. Concept modeling can also support other business analysis techniques such as requirements analysis, business process modeling, decision modeling, etc.
However, concept modeling also has some limitations or challenges that you need to be aware of and address.
Keep watching this space for more Business Analysis Techniques.
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