Documents formalize the interactions between enterprises and their customers and clients and the exchange of such documents often follow common patterns. Document Engineering provides the concepts and methods needed to align business strategy and information technology, to bridge the gap between what we want to do and how to do it. Describing business processes in terms of the more abstract notion of document exchanges makes it easier to understand the constraints imposed by legacy systems and technologies and to recognize the opportunities created by new ones if we focus on conceptual models of the exchanges rather than on how they are implemented. Document Engineering synthesizes complementary ideas from separate fields of business process analysis, task analysis, document analysis and data analysis. The essence of Document Engineering is analysis and design methods that yields precise specifications for the information and rules that business processes require.