Industrial keynote: Using Conceptual Modelling in (IT) Projects: A Practitioner's View

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IT professionals , explicitly or implicitly , develop conceptual models when trying to produce a high level description of the fundamental principles and the main functionalities of the “systems” (understood in the most general way: Enterprise Architecture, Infrastructure Blueprints, Information Systems, Database Systems, etc) they want to implement. They do it because they want:

1. Enhance the understanding of the “users”
2. Facilitate the dialogue among system’s stakeholders
3. Provide system designers with an input to produce system specifications at different levels
4. Document the system for future reference and collaboration activities

There several relevant questions to IT practitioners about the use of conceptual modelling that author will try to cover in his presentation on his more than 40 years of professional experience in the public sector as well as his conversations with hundreds of IT professionals in the public and private sectors

1. Why “conceptual modelling” is considered by many IT professionals as “too theoretical” or “too heavy”?
2. Which are the barriers and facilitators for its more formal adoption?
3. Is there a contradiction between “being agile” (for instance using agile development methodologies like Scrum) and the formal use of conceptual models?
4. What can be done about it?

The author will try to illustrate the answer to some of the above mentioned questions based on the results on an informal survey filled in by many of his contacts in public and private sectors.