The Integration 'Mega-App' Trend and Usability

The biggest trend in enterprise software right now is integration. Every combination imaginable. CRM with ERP and supply chain apps. Back office applications with marketing automation. And analytics embedded everywhere.

In fact, we are moving toward one massive mega-app for businesses. I’m not saying we’ll ever get there, but the consolidation is real. That’s because there is great value in connecting a customer-facing app with another that has inventory insight. Embed predictive analytics and that solution gets tighter.

There is useful data throughout the enterprise, strewn across the many disparate applications. So why can’t an accountant access data trapped in a CRM silo. Or the VP of customer service leverage information in the supply chain. The mega-app trend is freeing data and solving a decades old business problem – tearing down the silos that kept every department bound within their limited niche.

So now the challenge becomes usability. The accounting app that only a few people accessed is suddenly open to a broader range of users. It’s worthless if they face daunting challenges to navigate the app. Ease of use has emerged as a top priority in the new mega-app environment.

CPM Case

Take Corporate Performance Management (CPM, also sometimes called Enterprise Performance Management or EPM), for example. An application used by a handful of accountants that is now gaining broader use as part of an enterprise-wide metric-driven business approach. This includes sales, marketing, operations, HR and even departments like logistics seeking the benefit of additional information for their budgeting, efficiency initiatives and internal planning without committing to more complicated analytics tools.

In fact, CPM is ideal for the integrated mega-app trend, as it delivers insight and planning data that can be useful across the entire organization. Just as single-purpose micro apps, such as a dynamic calculator, timer or screen capture, provide functionality to improve the overall business application, CPM brings a strategic component to the increasingly integrated mega-app. This makes usability especially important

CPM vendors that have prioritized usability to help expand use of the application across the enterprise are taking an industry lead. In our recent Value Matrix, Host Analytics, IBM and Oracle continue to lead the pack in large part due to their usability advantage. A focus on usability helped Anaplan break into the leader quadrant and we are seeing more  emerge as competition increases.

Again, I’m not sure we’ll ever get to a single-vendor mega app for an entire enterprise, but we are increasingly moving toward broader and tighter integration across key business applications. As long as mega apps deliver more value than the sum of their parts, usability will be a key driver to help more users access a broader range of apps or application components.