Key concepts:
Composable digital technologies offer flexibility, allowing businesses to adapt to market changes and avoid vendor lock-in.
Monolithic platforms lack the speed and agility required for rapid response in turbulent markets, creating dependencies and delays.
Modularity, separation of concerns and interoperability help businesses innovate and respond swiftly to disruptions.
Is there market turbulence ahead? Are you feeling uncertain about how best to navigate it? Well, you probably should be.
The impact of tariffs, significant regulatory changes and other economic stress tests — along with the usual day-to-day competitive pressures, AI distractions and changing customer sentiments — add up to one thing: We can be sure that we need to be much better prepared for how to respond to upcoming marketplace changes.
Composability is a principle of breaking down rigid, monolithic platforms and cleverly assembling and integrating modular digital technologies to avoid big tech “lock-in” and costly project delays in launching new websites or digital products. Composability allows business sponsors to have more control of user interfaces by decoupling digital customer experiences from difficult-to-adapt legacy systems.
Teams skilled at using modular content and a modern UI component frameworks can much more easily and effectively respond to marketplace changes by reusing and integrating components, rather than building from scratch and taking a ticket and waiting for a centralized IT board to vet the business request.
This modular, “best-fit” approach allows business executives to quickly respond to change without being locked in or queued up behind a backlog of other resource-intensive projects.
If you are a business leader concerned about how your firm will be able to navigate upcoming changes and surprises, conduct a sober assessment of your current marketing technology and digital engagement practices. The question you must answer: “How quickly can we launch a net new website that captures user information and supports our customers’ and partners’ most critical needs?” Chief risk officers or their delegates should be a part of this exercise. If the answer is “It will take months, or more,” then you have a problem
When a wayward asteroid crashed into the earth 66 million years ago, the resulting cataclysm led to the extinction of almost all dinosaurs, which were not able to adapt to their new circumstances. Mammals, on the other hand, were smaller, smarter and better equipped to regroup and adjust.
Similarly, the sudden onset of the pandemic in 2020 and resulting shutdowns neatly divided businesses into two categories: those that were caught flat-footed versus those that adapted quickly. Up to that point, qualities such as agility, modularity and scalability may have seemed like abstract principles or nice-to-haves, but they immediately became essential attributes for core enterprise applications: particularly those that supported critical communications with clients and partners.
Digital communications require a seamless omnichannel experience that is easily accessed and relevant to the client or partner’s profile. If your team’s response is that they are unable to launch an omnichannel experience in days or weeks, then it is time to probe more deeply to understand what is holding them back from being able to more effectively engage clients and partners in the event of a crisis.
Legacy monolithic DXPs (digital experience platforms) were not designed primarily for speed or agility. While the all-in-one approach might seem like a time- and labor-saver, the reality is the monolith’s tightly coupled architecture — in which features and capabilities such as content management, personalization, analytics and ecommerce are unified in a single platform — actually slows speed-to-market.
In fact, all-in-one platforms result in increased complexity because their components are intertwined and interdependent, and updating or replacing one part without affecting the others can be challenging.
On top of that, these platforms create a dependency on a single vendor (which might find itself overwhelmed by customer requests in the event of unexpected circumstances). Because these monolithic platforms require specialized skills and certifications, there are limited personnel available to work on them, and, as a result, their services are priced accordingly.
If it seems this uncertain moment in history is a case study about the power of composable technology, well, perhaps it truly is. Every business needs to evaluate its martech strategy and decide whether its current tech stack meets its needs and provides competitive advantage.
A version of this article was originally published in CMSWire.
VShift is a digital strategy, design and technology agency for enterprise-scale brands in regulated industries.