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The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an ambitious project to build the world's largest radio telescope, eventually reaching one square kilometre in collecting area. The first phase of the project, SKA1, will consist of two telescopes: SKAl-LOW, comprising similar to 131,000 dipole antennas at the Murchison Radio Observatory in Western Australia covering the range 50-350 MHz, and SKAl-MID, comprising similar to 200 x 15-m dishes in the Karoo desert in South Africa covering the range 0.35-13.8 GHz. SKA1 is scheduled to commence operations in 2023 and, in order to appropriately influence the design of the system, operational planning has commenced. This paper presents an overview of the operational concept for SKAl.