Big-bang digital implementation — the flashy approach popular with enterprises stuck on legacy software monoliths — isn’t compatible with a composable future. This all-at-once changeover has a track record of failing to deliver on executive sponsor expectations — namely, to flexibly launch new digital products and websites at reasonable costs and within tight timeframes. While keeping consultants busy and billable, traditional technology deployment approaches are often too slow, too sequential and too rigid to handle changes in organizational strategy and customer needs.
With mounting economic pressure and shrinking margin of error, savvy executives need to leave this pressure-packed approach behind as the standard operating procedure of the past.
The answer? Purposeful composable implementation.
Effective and Efficient Digital Deployment
Facing the threats of recession and skills shortages, executive leaders continue to de-risk and pursue more effective approaches to meet faster moving market demands while ensuring digital products can scale and flex as they need to. Composable technologies are inherently modular and packaged up with best-fit services — like intelligent standardized blocks that can easily snap together to build value quickly with performance and scale.
Instead of forcing a one-time change, knowledgeable leaders can now progressively construct a core set of serverless and headless technology modules that can strategically extend depending on the organization’s most critical priorities or issues.
No longer a dream, the reality of flexible, modular digital product and website implementation is now upon us. The best way to deploy new growth tools and digital experiences more effectively and inexpensively is through progressive composable implementation [the dream].
Progressive composable implementation enables organization-wide deployment of technologies at scale, especially following successful digital innovation experiments.
Related Article: Have You Recognized the Potential of the Composable Digital Experience Stack?
Considerations Before Embarking on a Composable Future
Given the increasingly dynamic nature of our markets and the issues within organizations, there are several concerns to consider as you embark on a progressive implementation approach that best fits your organization’s reality:
- Geographic market first: You have a global, multilingual website already in existence, and the digital experience platform (DXP) is based on an old monolithic architecture. A progressive approach is to develop a composable ecosystem of headless technology and serverless orchestration for one geographic market at a time. Rather than redesign and relaunch in a big-bang fashion, you can progressively roll out a new, global public website by country and language while sunsetting monolithic technologies behind the scenes.
- Digital product first: Teams are already well-versed in minimal viable product (MVP) scope. Rather than limit the whole of a digital product to an MVP, scope the features that are most critical to users and then progressively roll out additional packaged-up product features, thereby leveraging API and microservice integration to legacy platforms.
- Department evangelist first: The same composable technology ecosystem can be assembled to provide different digital experiences to different functional heads (e.g., CMO, head of sales, CHRO, chief digital officer). The enthusiastic and empowered evangelist can serve as the early adopter, developing best practices that other functional heads can follow. For example, the same employee-training digital experience stack an evangelist CHRO may launch can be reassembled and deployed by the head of sales for sales enablement, then the CMO for the public web and campaign sites and finally the chief digital officer for core digital products.
- Content crisis first: Some organizations have messy and historically complex content models that utilize many diverse content sources. As an example, branding and campaign content could use a completely distinct set of processes and legacy technology than the technical product specification content, which requires a rigorous compliance process and utilizes a document management system. Organizations with content complexity are increasingly adopting a composable content leadership orientation that balances flexibility with auditability and process rigor. These organizations will seek to implement a common content model with integrations to legacy sources as a step toward resolving long-standing content crises.
- Tech debt reduction first: Most businesses report that they are carrying a large volume of technical debt that works against new product innovation. These organizations are desperate to divorce from expensive-to-maintain, licensed monolithic software and/or clunky resource intensive infrastructure. In these cases, the organization could opt to progressively deploy less-expensive composable technologies to eliminate lingering technical debt.
- Risk mitigation first: With a robust inventory of digital experiences across the enterprise and their supporting technologies, the head of risk, head of cybersecurity or the CFO may want to progressively start with sunsetting the highest risk, most vulnerable technologies as part of a progressive, composable implementation plan. Monolithic platforms may have not been updated in years, leaving the organization with security issues that can be more easily resolved by adopting composable technology in place of the legacy monolith.
Related Article: Marketing Technology Expands as Composable Business Models Are Embraced
Final Thoughts on Progressive Composable Technologies
The advent of composable technologies has many organizations realizing that cost and go-to-market savings at a departmental or single digital level can be scaled up and out to deliver far more benefits to their organizations. Though decoupled and composable strategies may be new for certain members of the team, a well-defined set of priorities will help achieve the dream of realizing cost savings, accelerating go-to-market launches and updating the digital experience framework.
Tackling a specific opportunity or problem area is a great starting point for a composable journey that will ultimately help businesses drive out risk and reduce tech debt and waste while transforming themselves into more market responsive innovators.
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