Consumer-Grade Applications That Work and Why

In my prior blog “The Keys to Creating Great Consumer-grade Apps,” I discussed what was meant by the term “consumer-grade apps.” I said that good consumer-grade apps were:

Figure 1: Chipotle Smartphone App

• Very easy to learn, use, and navigate
• Appealing to the eye—clear colors, fonts, and uncluttered interface
• Made productive use of maps and other mashups to make the information more actionable
• Remembered what I had done previously to speed and simplify the transaction
• Used game-like visualizations to make their mobile app more appealing

Bottom line was that the good consumer-grade apps presented the information I needed in a simple format in order to easily complete the transaction.

I recently had the good fortune to meet with Manish Sood, founder of Reltio. Manish reached out to me after reading my Graph Analytics blog. Manish and his team have built their product leveraging graph analytics on the cloud[1]. Their product is built on top of Apache Cassandra[2] and leverages social media type constructs to create a consumer-grade master data management (MDM) application designed specifically for the wide variety of data sources available in our Big Data world. In my words:

Reltio provides an easy-to-use visual environment that allows business users to integrate data from multiple internal and external data sources and then leverage social-media-type capabilities to discover, curate, update, enrich, and share the resulting customer insights with the rest of the enterprise. Bottom line:  Reltio enables the capture and sharing of institutional knowledge that was previously held captive across multiple corporate and personal information systems.

I was very impressed with how the application bundled information into a simple, familiar social media interface to enable some powerful discovery and sharing capabilities for front-line business users.

In one of many different use cases that Manish shared with me, Reltio has enabled front-line pharmaceutical sales reps to mine their customer lists to identify high-value sales targets. The application facilitates the validation and capture of additional information about their target health care providers (HCP). But equally important was the ability of the application to deploy social-media-like capabilities that enable the front-line users to validate and/or correct important profile information about the healthcare provider and their healthcare organizations (HCO), as well as add new information gathered from either direct HCP interactions, social media postings or Google searches back into the HCP and HCO profiles (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Reltio User Interface

One of the biggest challenges with pharmaceutical sales reps (and likely the same problem with most any sales reps) is that the heavy-weight sales force automation applications require sales reps to capture and input lots of information about their customers (for both management and compliance reasons), but provides very little back in return. As a result, much of what’s learned about the customers by the sales reps—that valuable institutional knowledge—is kept in private systems and never shared.

To facilitate the capture and sharing of information, the easy-to-use Reltio application leverages modern consumer-grade app concepts to do the following:

• Leverage crowdsourcing-type techniques to validate and correct information about healthcare providers (HCPs) and healthcare organizations (HCOs)
• Delivers recommendations about other HCPs and HCOs that the sales rep should be targeting given their current target list of HCPs and HCOs
• Facilitates the seamless addition of other information gathered from social media sites and Google searches into the HCP and HCO profiles

Reltio has done a very nice job of leveraging consumer-grade apps capabilities and integrating those capabilities into an enterprise application to address a hairy corporate application challenge: master data management.

Summary

Much like the Reltio product, we’re going to see the metamorphosis of large, monolithic enterprise apps into federations of more agile, mobile-centric, consumer-grade apps. These next generation enterprise apps will take their lead from the consumer apps that everyone is using on a daily basis (like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, Pinterest). They’ll leverage the best practices of these mobile apps by including consumer-centric functionality such as product or usage recommendations, easily integrating new data sources with existing profile data, and crowdsourcing the validation of existing and new data.