By Nadarajah Duhindan, Business Analyst Team Lead, Transport for London
As Business Analysts, we are well-versed in writing business requirements. Yet, this task becomes particularly challenging when faced with complex or poorly understood business needs. While Business Process Mapping is a common tool, it often falls short in revealing the deeper data structures that underpin these needs.
Through a real-world case study, this session explores how conceptual data modelling can provide a deeper understanding of business needs by mapping data entity life cycles, relationships and interactions. By leveraging this approach, organisations can gain clearer insights into their business processes, leading to more precise and structured requirement articulation.
Introducing the terms
The narrative will start by introducing the key terms, such as information, data, entity and attribute. Then it will explain what is meant by data modelling and its uses, introducing various types of data model – conceptual, logical and physical. For the Conceptual Data Model (CDM) it will work through an example and show its features.
Setting the Context
After introducing the terms, the narrative will then move to the context of the case study. It will provide a high-level view of the current business process, along with the support that the current system provides for the business process. It will also describe the future state of the business process, and the support expected from the system.
Understanding the underlying concepts
The narrative will stress the importance of making a start with a high-level process view. From this high-level understanding of the business needs, it will illustrate the challenges in identifying the concepts underneath – “the things” the business cares about. It will also explain how we explored “the things” with the business to enable us to translate them into data entities. In addition, the narrative will provide examples of the challenges we faced in defining “the things” and developing a common understanding with the business.
Developing the skeleton CDM
The slides will focus on how the initial set of data entities were used to identify the relationships between them. It will explain one-to-one and one-to-many relationships and – using the initial set of entities and their relationships in the case study – the narrative will explain the development of the skeleton CDM.
Unravelling the complexity
Then the narrative will focus on how the CDM is used to explore and identify likely attributes of the data entities and the to-be processes associated with them. From the case study it will explain how the initial entities were used to recognise more entities. It will also describe the likely to-be processes for managing these data entities and their dependencies on other entities.
Data life cycles
The key revelation of the data discovery is the complex data life cycle of some of the entities. Examples will be provided to explain at least one of the data entity life cycles, including the triggers and the business rules that govern the management of these life cycles.
Requirements
The slides will emphasise that standard process modelling may not have revealed all the data entities, their life cycles and the requirements to manage them. The narrative will describe some of the processes identified while building a conceptual data model with examples of requirements derived from the processes. An example of a more solid conceptual data model will be revealed at the end.
By the end of this session, you’ll see how Conceptual Data Modelling not only clarifies complexity but also drives better business outcomes. Let’s explore how you can bring this powerful tool into your own projects.
If you’ve ever struggled to cut through complexity and truly capture what the business needs, Conceptual Data Modelling could be the key to turning ambiguity into clarity. Join Nadarajah Duhindan, Business Analyst Team Lead at Transport for London, at BA2025 to see how this powerful technique can sharpen your analysis, improve stakeholder engagement, and lead to more accurate, actionable requirements.
📅 Monday, 15 September 2025 | 12:05 – 12:50 PM BST
📍 Convene 133 Houndsditch, London EC3A 7DB
Don’t miss this opportunity to discover how to move from complexity to clarity with Conceptual Data Modelling.
