In the world of data the first thing that comes to mind when talking about data models is entity-relationship diagrams. Very often those entity-relation diagrams are visual representations of a (physical) database structure.
Important and very valuable insight to have. There is however much more than the physical world that we find embedded in a (commercial) out of the box or cloud solution.
Most organizations have the same or at least similar data stored in multiple solutions that may have the same physical model but more often differ in structure. This difference can be in way the information gets stored e.g. an integer representation versus a float represenation or even text. It can also be that the models vary in terms of the width of what is being descibed because of the nature of the platform. For example in my ERP solution I may not need to know who created the build of the latest software version that I’m selling but in the engineering solution that might be crucial information to have.
To deal with complexity one is best of to aggregate the physical data models into a logical data model. Note the plural versus singular reference here. Logical data models allow us to have a solution independent view. This makes it a practical tool for business analysts and IT solution experts to talk to one another without the requirement of fully understanding the implementation.
There is however another level of data model that I would like to mention – the conceptual data model. One could view that as the simplified version of the logical data model.
Where in the logical data model there might be entities to describe Customer, customer addresses, customer subsidiaries, customer contacts and many many more for most people in the organization that level of information is simply too much – they just talk about the customer where dependent on the context of the conversation they may actually mean the contact person at the customer.
This conceptual level is what one can use to explain to people at more distance to the topic or project at hand what the intent is and how things are set up to date. It does not contain all the information, but what model does, but enough to tell the story.