So you have got yourself some smart devices. And there are innumerable apps seeking your attention, with a promise to make your lives more simplified and convenient. But is that really happening? Or is your phone or tablet getting cluttered with apps of the same category doing different jobs separately? If you seek help with finance, there is one app to calculate EMIs, one to track your savings, one to aid you in trading. Unless the bank provides with a holistic app and all your finance is linked with one bank, there is no umbrella app that takes care of all your finance requirements. Same is the case with other aspects of life. There are pedometer apps, heart rate apps, blood pressure apps and so on. And there is a plethora of apps of the same nature that could get you confused on which one to use. In short, the app market is too diverse for a user whose needs are rather integrated or combined.
Similar was the case with enterprise apps a few years back. If we go a back some decades, enterprises developed monolithic applications to serve different business processes. With time, these have developed and learned how to communicate with each other and work as integrated systems. So now the CRM understands the HRMS and ERP. This helps business functions work in collaboration. The Human Resources department is no longer silo-ed away from Finance and likewise. Integration has attained maturity in case of enterprises through the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
Yes, we are talking about a similar outfit for user-based mobile apps as well. We don’t need to create a massively heavy app to take care of all our finance, health or travel needs. What we rather need is something like the Enterprise Service Bus, if I can take the liberty to call it as an Application Integration Platform (AIP).
An AIP could become the platform for different apps to talk to each other, communicate and integrate, giving the user a much more holistic experience. Imagine the UI and UX that could be achieved by making this one possibility come true. In fact, there is already some progress in this direction in the industry. Apple has come up with ‘HealthKit’ – an integrated platform that lets all health related apps interact with each other and store consumer information. All this in good stead.
Stay tuned to know how we could make this happen.
Gopalakrishna is a former Happiest Mind and this content was created and published during his tenure.
