Starting in the early 1990s the FCO-IM method and theory steadily emerged out of the method NIAM. Many articles, books, tools and research material have been made public during that time.

The FCO-IM method contains the following set of structural principles which are additional to the basic principles of NIAM, such as natural language, concrete examples, user interviews and prescription based information modelling.

The data modeling method "FCO-IM" is a successor of the well known method NIAM; both use natural language to assemble the model. The FCO-IM is an advanced data modeling method which allows more elegant models, capable of better model to model transformations, while remaining to be easily validated by the business and it's users.

Fully Communication Oriented Information Modeling (FCO-IM) emphasizes modeling the communication aspect of data. Employees constantly exchange facts through communication, such as "Invoice 1238 has an invoice date 1-1-1999". FCO-IM models such communication and facts in natural language. This article highlights the importance of communication in developing a fact-based data model.

A unification of concepts was presented at the "Trends in informationmodeling" seminar by Harm van der Lek. It illustrates the elegancy of the method FCO-IM by indicating a reduction of elements used in various data modeling methods.

These days, what IT represents is commonly misunderstood. However, it used to be very clear: “It is the field of expertise to provide a form of automated communication between people.” Previously, it was all about automating manual administrative labor. Over time, systems were included in that communication. Business experts were trained to perform the programming of computers. Knowledge in and outside systems was still very integrated.