Alec Sharp presents keynote and workshop on DW & BI Summit 2026

On the Datawarehousing & Business Intelligence Summit Alec Sharp will present his session Concept Modelling with Normal People – Five Key Lessons From 45 Years of Modelling. The Datawarehousing & Business Intelligence Summit takes place on March 24th in the Van der Valk Hotel Utrecht, The Netherlands. On March 25th Alec Sharp will present the workshop Concept Modelling for Business Analysts.

Alec Sharp, a senior consultant and acclaimed teacher with Clariteq Systems Consulting, has deep expertise in a rare combination of fields – business analysis and requirements specification, data modelling, strategy development, facilitation, and, of course, business process modelling, analysis and design.

Alec Sharp reflects on building his first concept model in 1979; a poor design that resembled a hierarchical IMS database. Over decades of modelling work across diverse organisations, he distilled several guiding principles centered on one idea: data modelling is fundamentally for people, not machines. These principles remain essential today, even amid AI, virtual work, and rapid technological change.

Concept Modelling for Business Analysts
Concept Modelling (or Conceptual Data Modelling) has seen an amazing resurgence of popularity in recent years, and Alec Sharp illustrates in his workshop Concept Modelling for Business Analysts the many reasons for this along with practical techniques and guidelines to ensure useful models and business engagement. Drawing on over forty years of successful consulting and modelling, on projects of every size and type, this session provides proven techniques backed up with current, real-life examples.

As in previous years, this edition of the DW & BI Summit will offer an extensive programme with keynotes from speakers within the Data and Business Intelligence field like Alec Sharp, Eevamaija Virtanen, Juha Korpela, Mathias Vercauteren, and Dutch speakers Rick van der Lans, Jos van Dongen, Wouter van Aerle, Antoine Stelma and Rutger Rienks.

Workshops
Following this, a series of workshops will take place on March 25 in Utrecht, taught by Juha Korpela, Eevamaija Virtanen, Mathias Vercauteren and Alec Sharp:
– Data Mesh Information Architecture: modeling data products and domains by Juha Korpela (English language).
– Grounded AI in Data Warehousing: How to Make Your LLM Stop Lying by Eevamaija Virtanen (English).
– AI Governance, Responsible AI en Data Governance: Connecting the Dots by Mathias Vercauteren.
– Concept Modelling for Business Analysts by Alec Sharp (English).

About DW & BI Summit
The Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence Summit is organized annually by Adept Events and is affiliated with BI-Platform.nl.

Full programme of the DW & BI Summit and workshops.