25th September 2026
First iteration.
Still need to sort out a hero image for it we dont hate.
Find a Subject Matter Expert
Once we know the slice of reality we want to model, we need to find someone who lives in it. The Subject Matter Expert is our guide. The person who can describe how the organisation really works, in the language the organisation really uses.
Their words become the language of the Concept Model. Their stories become the Business Stories we capture in the next step. The Concepts, their Relationships and the Relationship Rules we surface later all trace back to what they tell us. Without them, we model from systems, documentation and our own assumptions, rather than from organisational reality.
Who can give us the stories that describe this slice of reality?
We could cobble the Concept Model together by gathering the evidence ourselves, sifting systems and documentation like a crime scene investigator piecing together what happened.
When we want the core context of the organisation, it is far easier to ask someone who already holds it.
The ideal Subject Matter Expert has hands-on experience in the slice we are modeling. They understand the individual tasks and the wider processes those tasks sit inside. And they can zoom out, simplifying the detail when a higher level of abstraction is all we need.
Someone like this can tell us how the work really happens, what the important Concepts are, and what the organisation means by each one. Ask them what they mean by a Customer, and we learn more in a sentence than a week of reading table definitions would ever teach us.
The question to ask ourselves is “who can give us a narrative description, a series of stories, that explain this slice of the organisational reality?”
However experienced a modeler we are, the answer is never us. Modeling Business Concepts is a collaborative activity. We never build the Model on our own.
It is tempting to turn to IT for this. They are close by, and they speak our language. That is the trap. We are not modeling the systems, we are modeling the organisation. Find the people who do the work, not the ones who automate it.
Occasionally we hear that the people we need are too busy, and that even if they had the time they would not understand what we were asking. The opposite is true. People love talking about their work. They rarely get asked about it properly. When someone listens with genuine curiosity, the stories flow.
And if it takes a crowd of people to cover a single slice, the slice is probably too big. Go back to the scope and narrow it.
Find a Subject Matter Expert who knows how the work really happens. Who knows how the money is really made.