CRM APPLICATIONS

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As informational applications are developed, the main source of data will be the data pool. The application will draw data from the pool, either to support queries directly or to store within the application's own database, perhaps in the form of aggregates. In addition, the application will, most likely, use its own data. This might be internal metadata or externally provided agency data such as geographic or demographic information.

The applications will have their own processing cycles, completely independent from those of the data pool. This includes processes for:

Data capture
Application-specific transformations
Loading
End- user access
Backup

This separation of the data pool from the applications means that new applications can be added at any time after the data pool is established. It makes the information architecture almost infinitely scalable, as each application will, most likely, store its own additional data in its own server. It also has the advantage that, in most cases, historical data will already exist in the pool for newly implemented applications.

It is likely that most applications will be purchased as packaged systems. There are many campaign management, personalization, data mining, and general analysis products on the market. It is generally not a good idea to reinvent these products and rebuild them from ground up. Even if they don't provide 100 percent of the functionality that is needed, they are usually still a better bet than bespoke development. With all such products, the data needed to drive them is expected to be provided from what they usually term , a data mart. With our architecture, these systems will invariably draw their data from the data pool, so the pool's architecture must be able to support such systems and give them the information they need.

We won't go into the applications in any detail here. These are more fully described in Chapter 10.

only for RuBoard - do not distribute or recompile