A Life Cycle Model of XML Documents

Electronic documents produced in business processes are valuable information resources for organizations. In many cases they have to be accessible long after the life of the business processes or information systems in connection with which they were created. To improve the management and preservation of documents, organizations are deploying Extensible Markup Language (XML) as a standardized format for documents. The goal of this paper is to increase understanding of XML document management and provide a framework to enable the analysis and description of the management of XML documents throughout their life. We followed the design science approach. We introduce a document life cycle model consisting of five phases. For each of the phases we describe the typical activities related to the management of XML documents. Furthermore, we also identify the typical actors, systems, and types of content items associated with the activities of the phases. We demonstrate the use of the model in two case studies: one concerning the State Budget Proposal of the Finnish government and the other concerning a faculty council meeting agenda at a university.