On nice and useful diagrams

As an occasional UML user, I find it sometimes troublesome to express more general software architecture concepts using only class, activity or even deployment diagrams. When the target audience does not have much IT knowledge, it may be difficult to present ideas by using diagrams intended for representing "executable" code. On the other hand, a set of boxes with no direct semantics associated to it might require a lot of effort (or presentation skills) to make it understandable.

I recently came across an interesting solution for this kind of problem, the Fundamental Modeling Concepts (or just FMC). From the website:

"It (FMC) enables people to communicate the concepts and structures of complex informational systems in an efficient way among the different types of stakeholders. A universal notation originating from existing standards, easy to learn and to apply, is defined to visualize the structures and to communicate in a coherent way. In contrast to most of the visualization and modeling standards of today it focuses on human comprehension of complex systems on all levels of abstraction by clearly separating conceptual structures from implementation structures."

Besides, you can make some really nice and understandable diagrams like this one. It definitely seems worth giving a quick look :D