With the demand for always-on, innovative apps, many businesses realize that their monolithic architecture is preventing them from delivering remarkable services. Silos and rigid processes do not allow them to offer excellent customer experiences, let alone release new services in days.
Composable business is an emerging paradigm that resolves the problems inherent in legacy software processes, by breaking down applications and processes into manageable chunks, enabling parallel design of business and technology. It’s based on the principles of modularity, autonomy, orchestration and discovery, which enables business acceleration and resilience.
The main drivers for businesses to adopt a composabile approach include entering new markets and new segments, streamlining operations, and creating hyper-customized, channel specific customer experiences as business demands evolve. As noted by Chris McNabb, CEO of Boomi, “The biggest challenge every business faces today is unifying their increasingly fragmented digital ecosystem so they can create the integrated experiences expected by customers, employees, and partners. Organizations that remove friction through fast, intelligent data discovery and cataloging, pervasive connectivity, process integration, and automating human workflows, are the ones best positioned to thrive.”
According to Gartner®, composable business is based on three tenets:
- Composable thinking
- Composable business architecture
- Composable technologies
Composable thinking
Adopting a new mindset is never easy, especially for established organizations that are used to running in a certain manner, possibly for decades. Moving from highly centralized, rigid processes to autonomous, self-organizing networks of teams requires the buy-in of the entire organization. With the adoption of composable thinking, organizational structures flatten as responsibilities move from the manager to team members. Decision making is accelerated, with a decentralized approach and fewer layers of decision-makers to wade through.
Team members now have more responsibility at all stages, from planning through execution, instead of the previous top-down directives. Not all stakeholders or team members are open to this new mindset, and getting everyone on board can be a significant challenge for many organizations. In addition, big enterprises may have long term software licenses that do not support composable business, so moving away from legacy systems may entail various costs. Teams may not be able to use their skills once the legacy software is phased out, and they may require retraining on new systems and technologies. A gradual approach often works best, by first identifying the channels that offer the best return on investment, and conducting a trial project in those areas.
Source: Gartner
Composable business architecture
Composable architecture offers a blueprint of the business to manage the pace of business change, using smaller, cross functional teams to enable flexibility and resiliency. The most important foundational step is for business and tech leaders to build a solid API strategy, based on the knowledge of what their teams are capable of accomplishing, and translating those capabilities into successful services. This strategy can reduce friction and enable alignment between business and tech leaders within the organization, promoting the quick assembly of new applications and services at a much reduced cost and effort.
Composable architecture facilitates faster release of services by breaking down applications and features into smaller agnostic building blocks that can operate independently of each other. Shared data models save development efforts by re-using various components. Cross-team collaboration encourages sharing of ideas and knowledge so that the optimum solution can be achieved. Flatter organizational structures allow junior team members to share information that would otherwise not have surfaced.
To improve the scalability, performance and versatility of the solutions that can be built over these architectures, Gartner® recommends designing architectures that anticipate the evolution of multiserver, multimodel and polyglot capabilities, keeping in mind that the structured stores can hold unstructured or semistructured data. Architectures such as a Digital Integration Hub enable the integration of data from different sources and various formats into a unified model. This integration abstracts the original sources, and the original structure may be transformed to best support the target contemporary applications.
Composable technologies
Businesses that adopt the composable business paradigm utilize technologies to digitalize the business and create automated and adaptable processes. A successful implementation of composable technology relies heavily on efficient product design. Iterative design is a given, and integrating data, analytics and applications is part and parcel of the required transformation. The technology must support continuous cross-team collaboration. As more teams utilize low-code/no-code (LCNC) tools, users with little or no coding expertise can securely and safely build enterprise-grade solutions, without relying on developers and operations professionals. This expansion in the creative pool can enable organizations to quickly create new apps with minimal assistance, facilitating innovation and differentiation.
Moving composable theory into composable operations
Almost all enterprises have begun modernizing their legacy architecture and processes, and by incorporating as many composable tenets as possible, they can accelerate this transformation. The consistent outcome of any composition project is more uniqueness in the market, enabling differentiation and disruption.
Businesses do not have the luxury of turning their operations off while they institute new methods, so hybrid operations are required as new systems are introduced while the legacy systems keep the wheels turning. Different parts of the tech stack can be replaced gradually, with overlap between developing and deploying new services before deprecating the legacy functions. This phase can continue for the long term, as some organizations may decide to keep specific data on their mainframes indefinitely.
Many organizations are reluctant to embark on such a process since they have invested so much time and resources into their traditional infrastructure. However, this process has to be weighed against the cost of doing nothing, and how that will impact future business. From the ongoing costs of maintaining and upgrading traditional software, to potential future losses based on non-responsive, outdated customer experiences, maintaining legacy software and not moving to more current systems also has ts costs.
Thorough planning is required to identify the silos and determine how to replace the monoliths with modular architectural building blocks that enable reuse of resources and promote simplicity. Information that is stored in data lakes is often trapped in disconnected silos, and not easily accessible to real-time applications. Here solutions like digital integration hubs that are built according to the composable business model are an excellent way to make access to data simpler, more efficient and more cost effective.
It’s best to build a few pilot projects that should provide the highest potential return on investment, and define specific criteria for success. Testing should be executed on a small sample; it’s critical to evaluate the results and lessons learned before expanding to the wider business. An orchestration platform may be required to manage the various types and components.
To summarize, organizations that have turned themselves into composable enterprises have a much tighter relationship between technology and business units, and can quickly assemble new applications and services in a collaborative, agile fashion, at a fraction of the historical cost. Gartner predicts that businesses that embrace composability will outpace their competition by 80% in implementing new product features. Even if the actual results are slightly lower than this figure, composability offers significant benefits to the organization and to its bottom line.
