Intelligent composable business transforms decision-making by accessing and reacting on data in a better, more flexible method. Intelligent composable business will allow redesigned digital business moments, new business models, autonomous operations and new products, services and channels to exist.
A composable business model is an acceleration of the digital era and offers both the customer and employee an agile experience; you are ensuring real-time adaptability. Architecting your business processes around this idea, forces businesses to be resilient in the ever-changing times and creates a culture of stability within evolving environments.
You can think of the general concept of composability like building blocks that form a greater whole. The form of that whole could begin as a house, then evolve into a tower. Composable architectures can change shape and add capabilities relatively easily, because they’re made of blocks of different shapes, sizes, and functionality that can be evolved to fit a new need.
In contrast, monolithic systems are solid wholes. They’re the prefab house that comes assembled and it’s not easy to change what they do and how they do it. When you want to expand a monolithic system or add to or change functionality, you’ve either got to start from scratch or plan for a long development period in order to change it.
When it comes to tech stacks, this more modular approach to business platform architecture allows for greater flexibility and extensibility. Retailers and the developers they work with can pick their preferred third party services or apps and compose them into an ecommerce site. In theory at least (we’ll go into the realities below) this can be done at a speed that’s more in line with the speed of business in contrast to a traditional, clunky monolithic platform developed in a lengthy waterfall development cycle.
The three building blocks of composable business
- Composable thinking: when you combine the principles of modularity, autonomy, orchestration and discovery with composable thinking, it can guide your approach to conceptualizing when to compose, and what.
- Composable business architecture ensures that a business is built to be flexible and resilient. It’s about structure and purpose. These are structural capabilities — giving you mechanisms to use in architecting your business.
- Composable technologies are the tools for today and tomorrow. They are the pieces and parts, and what connects them all. The four principles are product design goals driving the features of technology that support the notions of composability.
What are the benefits of a composable business?
Composable businesses come with a number of benefits, which mirror that of composable architecture.
Easier scaling
Composable businesses are easier to scale than businesses that are more monolithic in shape. With new customers comes the need for new infrastructure, new products, and new processes, whether we’re talking about additional back-end fulfillment capabilities or a new approach to more seamless checkouts. In a composable business structure, existing capabilities can be drawn from, reintegrated, and added to as new capabilities to meet demand. Rather than building entirely new systems that take months if not years to implement, business building blocks are simply added and built upon to expand.
Individual empowerment
Composable businesses empower the individual user or unit to fix problems and add new capabilities as needed. This local authority can increase efficiency and provide a better sense of ownership than in monolithic systems where roles are obscured.
Resilience and adaptability
Two of the biggest benefits of composable business are the organization’s ability to quickly react and adapt to market changes. While still a challenge, an unexpected and unprecedented event like the COVID-19 pandemic becomes a new challenge to pivot around with new processes, services, and products. For instance, a clothing manufacturer that viewed their processes in a composable manner might have pivoted quickly to produce masks using the same processes they used to make shirts. Composability allows businesses to plan for the current reality, and adapt quickly to the future.
What are the disadvantages of a composable business?
Organizational complexity and overhead
Fully composable organizations increase organizational complexity. Unlike with a clear hierarchical structure, distributed teams can be difficult to navigate when it comes time to coordinate. Who owns what, and who should any given person go to for feedback and development? It can also increase redundancy if the business units are operating too independently without enough cross-communication. This can in turn increase overhead and costs. After all, some problems are best solved at a more global level, rather than at individual, smaller scales.
Performance and reliability issues
Fragmentation can lead to performance issues, which can in turn slow business processes and technical development. The absence of shared processes can lead to different business units operating in wildly different ways—and this can make it difficult to design for. On the technical side, it can be challenging to debug a distributed system, and the lack of a shared code base can slow developer productivity.
Increased costs
From maintenance to operational costs, and everything in between, increased complexity leads to increased costs. The same goes for the security vulnerabilities created when there are disparate business packages rather than hardened units. Fully composable business structures and platforms can require a great deal of technical overhead and support, each of which have their costs.
No comments:
Post a Comment