Applications are complete enterprise software solutions; that do something particular like manage customer relations, control production and inventory, or mine content for fraudulent behavior. Applications can be grouped in many ways. We chose four: eDiscovery applications that provide risk management and legal discovery, commerce applications that manage product catalogs and the buying and selling process, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications that manage the relationship between vendor and customer, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications that run the company’s processes (e.g. finance, production and inventory control, supply chain management, human resources).
eDiscovery
Sources: Email, instant messages, archived files, application data, warehouse data
Actions focus on the discovery process: identifying data and content that meet specific criteria set by rules or persistent queries. Actions can also include pre-emptive or proactive triggers that warn when a rule is broken.
Commerce
Sources: Product catalogs, customer data, order data, store data, workflow information
Possible actions include address scrubbing, buying profile codes, suggesting offers and upsells, availability notifications.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Sources: Data (e.g. customers, contacts, products, sales), files (e.g. contracts, product literature), email (e.g. sales comments), workflow information
Possible actions include data updates (e.g. customer record reconciliation), boundary triggers (e.g. low sales warnings near end of quarter), workflow updates (move state to “offer 3525”).
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Sources: Data (e.g. products, inventory, production status, supply chain information)
Actions can vary widely since ERPs cover many areas. Any action that can be triggered by a piece of information, especially from an outside source, is possible (e.g. low inventory notifications, product overage warnings, supply chain bottleneck alarms).