4. Document Engineering as the Methodology for Exploiting the Internet as a Business Platform

• "Document Engineering" is evolving as a new discipline for specifying, designing, and implementing the electronic documents that request or provide interfaces to business processes via Web-based services

• Viewing business models as a network of document exchanges raises some questions:

  • What information is being exchanged?

  • How do we know what the document means?

  • Does the recipient know how to process the document?

  • Does the recipient process the document the way we expect?

  • How do we preserve our investments in older technologies for document exchange while taking advantage of new ones?

  • How do we preserve our investments in business processes and relationships while creating new ones?

• These are not new questions

• The essence of Document Engineering is the analysis and design methods that yield formal models that answer these questions by describing the information that business processes or services require