Patent ID: 7702718

Claim:
A method comprising: providing an application used to manage an enterprise, the application generating a body of aggregated and summarized information, the information being temporally consistent and based on underlying data sets that represent revenues of the enterprise and that are generated or stored at respective locations of the enterprise, at least some of the data in different ones of the data sets being expressed in a manner that is temporally and formally inconsistent, the data of the underlying data sets changing over time; causing each of at least two different executable agents that are associated with respective underlying data sets to perform tasks on data in the associated underlying data set, to produce processed data, the processed data produced by the different executable agents being expressed in a manner that is formally consistent, temporally consistent, and current with respect to the information to be provided through the application used to manage an enterprise, the executable agents being organized in accordance with a network model, the executable agents being of a type from the group of: data extractor, data transformer, and information change monitor; providing a modeling layer including a business entity model to map a universal model into a native model in the context of the enterprise; and delivering the processed data among the agents to enable assembly of the body of aggregated and summarized information that is provided through the application used to manage an enterprise, based on the processed data, to be used to manage aspects of the enterprise.