Document Engineering: Analyzing and Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services

Citation

Urquhart, C. and Spence, J. (2007), "Document Engineering: Analyzing and Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 63 No. 2, pp. 288-290. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410710737240

This book discusses a different approach to systems analysis, and a different way of thinking about the way documents are created within, and between organisations or their customers. It could be used as a textbook as befits its origins in lecture notes for a Document Engineering course at UC Berkeley, although the authors have considerably expanded, and revised the text over the years. The structure of each chapter is similar, with introduction, main body of text, and summary of the main points at the end. Footnotes, and references are provided at the back of the book and provide valuable information on opinions, assumptions and other more controversial aspects of the discussion.

Glushko and McGrath deal with the principles first, and the first five chapters describe XML (Chapter 2), models, patterns and reuse (Chapter 3), views of business and business processes (Chapter 4), the development of flexible business models and the concept of web services (Chapter 5) and the problems that arise when interoperability does not happen (Chapter 6). The next set of chapters discusses the application of the document engineering approach, and sets out how a systems analysis focused on document engineering would work in practice. Chapter 8 considers the context analysis to determine the general business rules, whether implicit or explicit, Chapter 9 discusses business processes and the general patterns associated with transactions and collaborations (e.g. in contract formation and acceptance). Chapter 10 continues the theme of patterns, discussing how patterns may be identified, at different levels of granularity, and used to explore new ways of doing things, possibly with some adaptation. Chapters 11 to 14 deal with the documents, covering the document inventory, analysis of the components in documents, analysis of the relationship between documents, and document assembly. Chapter 15 discusses implementation routes, and Chapter 16 considers the strategic issues.

The authors claim in their epilogue that document engineering is a creative synthesis of other disciplines such as information and systems analysis, electronic publishing, business process analysis, and user centred design. It is intended to illuminate how documents and processes come together. Does it work – and do we need document engineering? The approach certainly brings together some parts of modelling that have proceeded along their own paths, for good reasons at the time. One of us was provided with a framework to integrate some of the more disparate parts of our systems thinking that have tended to view XML in one silo and business process modelling in another. The examples help enormously although we did wince on page 82 when a class diagram demonstrated that even if the book has more than one edition or binding, it has only one ISBN. This seemed a very strange oversight. However, apart from that, we were impressed at the level of detail and explanation in the examples. The techniques used should be familiar to most systems analysts, as appropriate use is made of UML (Unified Modelling Language), the business process analysis refers to existing business process libraries, and normalisation appears in the section dealing with assembly of document components. The application and philosophy are different but some of the techniques used are at least familiar. There are plenty references to current developments in e‐commerce.

For teaching information systems analysis the book does have chapters and explanations that would be hard to find elsewhere, all in one volume. The explanation of the interoperability problems, the discussion of the creation of an electronic document such as an events calendar and the analysis of document components – all these would be useful. We liked the different ways of developing and using patterns to explore processes. There are other approaches to business process analysis (e.g. Ould, 2005) and some of these probably deal just as effectively with modelling the work of an organisation and the interactions. As the authors acknowledge, trying to pigeonhole the processes of an organisation to fit existing patterns is not necessarily a good thing to do, although the application of the pattern can raise questions and help identify what really is important about the process to the organisation. There are alternative approaches to business process analysis that in fact focus on the relationship between process and artefact (e.g. Holt, 2005) and analysts used to one methodology might question the need to change. The authors have concentrated on e‐commerce applications and current transactions, and in Chapter 15 look forward to the semantic web, but with some reservations.

We were a little puzzled to find little reference to any application in records management systems, as this seemed to be the obvious application for the book. Whilst document engineering seems to be concerned only with the operational life of the document, there are distinct overlaps with the records management discipline and it is perhaps surprising that there is no reference made to the literature in this field, nor an acknowledgement of the role of records management in document engineering itself. Figure 7.2, which outlines the phases of the document engineering approach, illustrates activities that are reflected in standard records management processes – contextualisation, process analysis, classification of records, file plan construction, identification and maintenance of relationships and dependencies. Indeed, Chapter 11 deals specifically with the classic records management activity of inventory creation.

Of the three key factors described as dominating document engineering – end‐to‐end scope, breadth of documents, and technology independent document exchanges, the first two are fundamental to records management and the third forms the basis for the OAIS (Open Archival Information System) model, which although concerned with archive‐to‐archive records exchange, is nevertheless dedicated to the notion of “seamless transfer” of records from one repository to another. The “artefact focused view of modelling” (p. 214) advocated by the authors is exactly that adopted by records managers and the fundamental principles of preserving a record's context, content and structure are implicit in the text. Document engineering takes a wider view of the artefacts, making no distinction between documents and records; but the “end‐to‐end scope” extends only to the active use of the documents in question.

The two disciplines complement each other and this book certainly provides a rendezvous for records and information systems managers to communicate. As a teaching aid for records management, it provides models for a business‐focused way of viewing an organisation's documents and records, hitherto lacking in the records management literature, and provides workable alternative models and approaches to building pragmatic, practical solutions that can be embedded in the organisation's technical infrastructure. However, there is a distinct focus on transactional documents and with the exception of a reference to “narrative documents” (p.378), there is little discussion of the volume of unstructured documents which many organisations struggle to manage effectively, and which would undoubtedly benefit from a document engineering approach.