Design principles for application integration

Application integration is a major trend in information technology today. In this paper we present a number of principles for the design, validation and presentation of process models which align the applications of an organisation to its business processes. The design principles are divided into two groups. The first group consists of guidelines that obtain different views of the models and thereby facilitate for different stakeholders, e.g. business managers, designers and operators, to use common models and process languages. The second group of principles consists of guidelines to check the completeness of the process models. The paper also presents a process description language, BML (Business Model Language), which is tailored for modelling application integration.