Assess Your Organization’s Compose-Ability

Time to market: On average, how long does it take your team to conceive, design, develop and launch a website or digital product?

Experience with headless tech: In the past five years, has your team implemented any headless technology, i.e., an architecture in which content from one system is distributed to one or more endpoints for presentation?

Operational independence: Can your organization’s line of business or functional leaders – e.g., your CMO – make updates to front-end experiences with their own front-end developers without having to rely on IT resources? In other words, has your organization decoupled content management and digital marketing from the centralized IT function?

Reusable components: Are the front-end components for your public-facing website available for reuse by other business functions, e.g., sales enablement, support, product management, employee engagement? Or are multiple internal teams creating functionally similar experiences using unique, redundant components?

Vendor lock-in: Does your organization have teams or departments that work exclusively with a particular vendor (e.g., the Adobe team, or the Salesforce team)? Are you beholden to those teams when work needs to be performed on those platforms (e.g., a campaign microsite on Adobe Experience Manager or a leads capture form on Salesforce)?

Licensing flexibility: Does your vendor and software procurement policy prefer shorter licensing and subscription terms – e.g., 12 or 24 months – to maintain the flexibility to swap out technology in a relatively short timeframe when better or less expensive technology becomes available?

Separation of concerns: Does your organization employ a “separation of concerns” approach in which application modules – e.g., user authentication – are loosely coupled to minimize impact on other modules, enabling easier integration into other projects?

Staff skillsets: Does your current staff (or positions for which you are recruiting) have composability skills and experience with microservices, Jamstack, serverless, API, composable, decoupled, headless, etc.?

Cross-functional governance: Does your organization employ cross-functional governance and operate in ways that lead to collaboration and component reuse?