“Silicon Valley Can Launch a Website in a Day. Why Does It Take My Company a Year?”

• Top tech firms have dramatically reduced time to market by embracing modular, component-based technologies and an operating model that can push out new websites in days and new features in hours.

• In contrast, for enterprise-scale businesses in regulated industries like financial services and healthcare, standing up even a marketing microsite is a huge lift. These firms have made considerable investments in software suites whose monolithic architectures rely on heavily backlogged specialty IT resources.

• By adopting the more modern Silicon Valley approach of modular software and operational independence, regulated businesses can reduce time to market.

We hear it all the time from CMOs, heads of digital and others in and around the C-suite: “Why is it such a struggle to launch digital products, mobile apps and websites?” After all, in Silicon Valley, where startups have long prized speed to market, business teams have the authority and skills to develop digital products independently, without reliance on IT or “big ticket” enterprise software.

A timeline of weeks versus one of months: The disparity is stark, and it’s not simply a case of small companies are fast/big companies are slow. It’s a tale of two fundamentally different approaches to digital product development.

Many enterprise-scale organizations have adopted a CMS platform such as AEM or Acquia – and invested in UX libraries, integrations, development teams and management processes. Maintaining the platform falls to developers with specialized skillsets within the IT group.

This centralized approach creates a strong preference for developing “common denominator” features that benefit multiple business units – so if you want, say, a new leads capture process, better hope another group needs it too. Prepare for turf battles over resources and prioritization.

The advantages are clear: time and cost savings, flexibility to choose best-of-breed components, and a competitive bulwark against fast-moving startups.

Might there be technology outside the centralized platform that can deliver the necessary functionality? Yes, there very well might be. But an organization that has poured millions into a monolithic solution generally wants to show ROI on that investment, even if there’s an inexpensive – and better – solution available.

The advantages of the modular approach – built on a decoupled architecture – are clear: huge time and cost savings, flexibility to choose best-of-breed components and, maybe most important, a competitive bulwark against the fast-moving startups (e.g., fintechs) built to outmaneuver established players. It’s no surprise the next generation of developers overwhelmingly prefers the modern, modular approach – it’s fast, agile, lightweight and feels right to those who’ve grown up in a world of distributed web technologies.

Yes, your company can operate like a Silicon Valley tech firm. And no, institutional change is never easy. Here’s a glossary to help you through the many discussions you will likely have on your way to adopting a speedy and effective modular operating model.

In a decoupled technical architecture, the front-end and back-end can communicate but are separated from one another. Making changes or updates is faster because you reduce the risk of edits to the back-end inadvertently affecting what the user interacts with – the front-end.

A composable architecture is one comprised of functional modules that can be easily added, removed or replaced. A composable approach enables an organization to select and configure best of breed components, increasing flexibility and saving time. Read more on composable business from Gartner.

Jamstack is an architecture that provides tools and workflows to make building websites and digital applications faster, more secure and easier to scale.

Low code describes a solution in which nontechnical business users and product owners can configure a solution with less reliance on technical resources. This speeds time to market and reduces the burden on IT, which can focus its energies elsewhere.

Atomic design refers to website elements that can be assembled into larger structures (e.g., navigation items, buttons, page templates and so on). They are then provided to distributed teams to ensure consistency of visual design and user experience across multiple geographies, divisions and product lines.

The orchestration layer is the business logic that manages the interactions among components of the system. Orchestration enables developers to assemble a solution from multiple independent components.

A microservices-driven architecture features independent, interoperable functional “containers” that are easily assembled and reused. These containers refer to packages of software and functionality that include everything needed to run within the digital ecosystem.

A cloud-native application takes advantage of cloud-based services to improve speed, scalability and flexibility.

The MACH Alliance is an industry organization that advocates for an open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystem. The acronym stands for: Microservices based; API-first; Cloud-native/SaaS; Headless. MACH embraces the approach and characteristics described above in this article.