As someone operating in the role of CMO at a digital enterprise, it’s abundantly clear to me that the business world is undergoing a dramatic paradigm shift towards composable models. It’s not hard to see why, either. Enterprise technologies are being iterated upon at a higher rate than ever before, and that rate is accelerating year on year. At the same time, customer and employee expectations are evolving and becoming more fluid. In many ways, the commercial landscape is in a state of flux, and companies need to achieve maximal change agility to truly thrive in the coming years. This realization has brought about the rise of the composable business movement.
The Composable Business Movement
Composable business is a new methodology that acknowledges the failings of the past. Rather than seeking to meet their goals through a one-size-fits-all approach, composable businesses seek to achieve greater nuance in how they tackle their objectives and deliver value to customers. As circumstances continually change and expectations evolve, composable businesses are better equipped to move with the times.
The philosophy has taken strong root in recent years, with entrepreneurs the world over embracing the ideals of composable business in the most fundamental aspects of their enterprises. Recent research from Gartner illustrates this, too, showing that a huge 60% of finance organizations already intend to adopt composable finance architecture by 2024. Moreover, they have predicted that those who are embracing composable business will soon outpace the competition by 80%.
It’s clear that composable business is the way of the future, but becoming an agile and articulate enough organization to make this work is difficult, to say the least. It requires a rock-solid framework for change and the capacity reliably enact digital transformations at scale. This is where digitization comes into play.
Establishing Foundations With Digitization
As you likely know, digitization is the process of converting analog informational assets into digital formats. On the most fundamental level, digitization is an essential process in today’s world because it enables organizations to make information more accessible and searchable, enabling greater efficiency and collaboration among employees, especially in the digital workplace. However, digitization has another more crucial role to play on the macro scale.
Through effective digitization, enterprises can effectively build a platform for consistently successful digital transformation. In this sense, digitization is essential to organizations seeking to reinvent themselves as more dynamic modular entities.
To illustrate this point, let’s look at two main ways that digitization can pave the wave for composable business:
Flexibility in Software
For a composable business model to work, particularly in the tech sphere, you need your software tools to integrate smoothly and your products to be independently deployable. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) fulfill the former requirement by facilitating frictionless interaction between tools, while microservices fulfill the latter by providing an architecture that empowers the rapid, reliable delivery of self-contained software modules. What both have in common is that they rely on a solid data infrastructure, and this is where digitization is vital.
By digitizing informational resources, companies can build comprehensive databases which can empower them to leverage the power of APIs and microservices. This gives management the essential components with which to build and continually modify their process in order to align their operations more closely with their organizational goals. Moreover, it makes these organizations significantly more scalable.
Responsiveness to Customer Trends
As we’ve already touched on, customer expectations are evolving all the time. While this is true, there is clear and consistent trend at the macro level, as customers are increasingly prioritizing experiences when they assess the value of a product or service. This means that the market-leading forces of the coming years will be those enterprises that are most responsive to customer preferences, and digitization has a major role to play here too.
By digitizing informational resources and documents relating to customer interactions, companies can centralize critical data using software like CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems and analyze it to glean actionable insights into their CX and customer journeys. This can enable them to more quickly identify what’s working, what isn’t, and which elements to modify or replace in order to elevate the experience and deliver maximal value.
In short, digitization can help to inform decision-making processes so that composable companies can respond to customer expectations strategically, efficiently, and with precision.
Concluding
The business world of today is characterized by continual change, especially when it comes to tech, so adaptability is the name of the game. To that end, it’s clear that composable models are the way forward, but becoming a composable enterprise means creating a solid data infrastructure and a framework that will support continual transformations and a more modular CX. Digitization is to first step on the path to success as a composable enterprise, and those who embrace this idea early will surely reap immense rewards.
