Let’s play building blocks: The Composable Enterprise

It is a fact that changes are occurring faster and faster, people do not have the same likes and needs now as they did ten years ago and, therefore, companies need to adapt in order to continue to deliver the expected (and unexpected) value to their customers.

Organizations must evolve along with changing business needs, diversified market demands and evolving consumer trends, not to mention unforeseen events such as the pandemic years ago. They must do so not only to increase profits but, in many cases, also to survive; there are many Blockbusters along the way.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of having agile processes and infrastructure to pivot on aspects such as changing suppliers, reducing costs under certain circumstances, changing business models or providing remote access to systems to be able to work from home.

Companies used to prepare for the future, now they must prepare for several futures that can be present in a short time.

The way to provide flexibility to businesses is through the modularity of the organization, thus achieving resilient and agile enterprises; this is what is known as the Composable Enterprise, a term coined by Gartner. Through the composable enterprise, we can deliver products, services and experiences built faster and with more agility and efficiency.

The concept itself is simple. Just as in building block sets, we substitute one piece for another to change the overall shape of the whole, in the composable enterprise we will have our building blocks called PBCs (Packaged Business Capabilities) which, as the name suggests, will offer business capabilities so that we can configure them according to our needs.

If the reader is familiar with solution architectures, this talk about modularity will sound familiar, and so it is. From monolithic applications, architectures have evolved in search of agility and resilience, and these have been found through APIS, containers and microservices. In other words, it has been achieved through modularity. We can divide applications into different domains and these can be served individually and independently so that each domain can be evolved separately and in the event of a service failure, only that part of the solution will fail and not the whole. Similarly, it is easy to add new capabilities or replace one type of capability with another thanks to the autonomy of each of the modules and their orchestration, allowing low coupling between them.

This type of modularity can also be seen in data management, where paradigms such as Data Mesh promote the use of modular domains to improve flexibility and agility without detriment to interoperability, thus breaking down information silos but maintaining independence.

Following the same philosophy, the composable enterprise divides its business into different domains or capabilities that are served independently to other capabilities.

The composable enterprise is based on four principles:

More speed through discovery

Increase the agility through modularity

Develop greater leadership through orchestration

Increasing the resilience through autonomy

These principles govern the way of working from three main aspects:

Composable thinking as a driver of creativity; through the principles mentioned above, we have the tools to guide us in the conceptualization of new ideas. All of them fit into this model and allow us to test them quickly and at a low cost. We can accept them if they are valid and discard them if they are not. There is no limit to the imagination.

Composable enterprise architecture to ensure that the organization is built to be flexible and resilient. It is important to ensure innovation and agile change, but it is also important that the business continues to operate securely and without disruption.

Composable technologies to rely on for solution development. The technologies and their appropriate use make it possible to deploy the ideas on the conceived enterprise architecture.

Composable Enterprise

With this approach, we will be able to pivot our businesses to the most appropriate solutions at any given time, such as transforming a clothing manufacturing company into a mask factory during the pandemic and returning to its original business after the pandemic. Or testing new business models and including them frictionlessly in our portfolio in case of success and discarding them without severely impacting the business.

When thinking about composability, the mind should go to business capabilities (BCPs) that can be rethought and reused. But what are they reused for? The answer is to meet the needs of consumers because the consumer experience is at the core of composable business.

We have already introduced the concept of BCPs, but what are they really?

PBCs are defined and packaged enterprise capabilities needed to create custom applications. They are “the Lego pieces” of the composable enterprise. PBCs expose APIs, so that the application team can reuse them in the process of creating new solutions. The idea is to be able to combine different PBCs to create solutions that adapt to changing business needs at any given time.

For the more technologically minded, we could see PBCs as a combination of microservices, conveniently packaged for the business, so that they can be reassigned and reused as many times as necessary. Of course, for this reuse we will need a correct use of APIs and their orchestration.

BCPs are not purely technological; on the contrary, they are business and process. They are business capabilities packaged and made available to other capabilities through technology to provide value, personalization and customer experience.

Thus, with this modularity in the business, we obtain multiple advantages, among which we can mention:

Being able to assemble and disassemble different PBC to meet the demands and needs of our consumers, being able to easily keep what works and discard what does not work or is obsolete.

Avoid dependence on a specific system that may become obsolete over time.

Scalability of each PBC separately, avoiding cost overruns or oversizing.

In case of failure, this occurs only in a small part of the entire business, so that the rest of the processes can continue working.

For some of the requirements that will arise when adapting our businesses, we will see that even the most modern traditional IT structures fail to react to rapidly changing demands, and the same is true for legacy systems. In these cases, the use of the cloud and its great scalability and flexibility is a superb ally.

We must think processes to be composable. We can say that digital transformation is the way to become a composable company and vice versa.

If we focus on the great competitiveness of the business world and the increase in consumer expectations, there is only one solution to meet them: to become a composable company.