Excel can be a good intermediate representation for talented non-programmers. A few years back I did some work with a non-programmer who was an expert in admin

Excel can be a good intermediate representation for talented non-programmers. A few years back I did some work with a non-programmer who was an expert in administrating Microsoft Exchange. Other programmers were expected to get knowledge from him but the team didn't have a good way to represent it and very attempt at getting him to do CIM-style modeling was a disaster. I was new to the team when they asked me to help. I threw together some Perl modules that took an Active Directory dump and generated a pile of Excel workbooks and made those the common model for the information. None of the other programmers liked the idea of Perl, but I was able to encapsulate it as a special Visual Studio build rule so they never had to do anything other than occasionally run a special build rule. The result was a success because Excel was something the expert understood and working from the generated worksheet allowed everyone to come to agreement on what existing entities and attributes were needed to do what they wanted.