Editorial
The Gist
- Achieve engagement. Building digital experiences around the customer journey and enabling cross-team collaboration is essential for continual engagement.
- Explore new tech. Experimenting with new technologies and aligning KPIs to move the needle are key to building successful composable digital experiences.
A new approach to enterprise architecture can drive innovation and digital transformation and evolve from a prescribed, one-size-fits all approach. This approach is composability.
According to Gartner, a composable enterprise is an organization that can innovate and adapt to changing business needs through the assembly and combination of packaged business capabilities. Rather than focusing on a single moment, user or channel — with a composable architecture, brands can leverage content, data and design to fuel engagement.
Let’s look at four best practices for building successful composable digital experiences:
1. Center Around the Customer Journey
When your customers interact with your brand, they aren’t experiencing one siloed technology or department. They are experiencing your brand or organization as a whole and view that exchange as one overarching experience. This makes it extremely important to build your digital experiences in a way that allows for continual engagement.
However, what often happens is — even if there is a vision to build a specific digital experience that maps back to the customer journey — it gets lost as teams work to build out each stage of the process. While being modular and component-driven is great for developers, it doesn't necessarily enable other business stakeholders to take part in the experience creation. Although it can be easier to operate as siloes, cross-team collaboration and involvement across all departments — from marketing and sales to engineering and HR — will yield the best, most effective digital experiences.
Related Article: Have You Recognized the Potential of the Composable Digital Experience Stack?
2. Adopt an Agile Approach
In an era of acceleration, agility is essential. The pace of innovation is so rapid today that even if you could afford to take on a three-year project, by the time you reach the end, you will have missed half of the new technologies that have emerged.
Look to low code and no code tools to enable teams to deliver better customer experiences, faster. To be effective, however, they need to be implemented throughout the entire process of building composable digital experiences — from the content layer, to the data layer, to the orchestration layer. Integration platform as a service (iPaaS) tools like Workato or MuleSoft enable you to connect your software, so you can operate numerous applications simultaneously. When you have a solution that no longer serves your business, simply take it out and introduce a new technology, all while using these connective no code tools to keep everything running smoothly.
3. Evaluate Your Integrations
Open source software is a great option as it allows for integrations with third-party commerce platforms, digital asset management platforms, analytics platforms, CRM systems, marketing automation software and front-end frameworks. This really extends your agility, and ultimately makes building digital experiences that much easier.
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However, not all APIs are created equal, so it’s important to have a deep understanding of the ones you are integrating through. One way to ensure you’re making the right decision is to have an engineer examine your chosen API to ensure it not only fulfills your needs and requirements, but is also secure enough to help you build your digital experiences.
Related Article: The Benefits — and Challenges — of Composable Digital Experience Platforms
4. Experiment Where You Can
It can be difficult to build and maintain a software stack comprising many components. Additionally, economic conditions and inflationary pressures continue to strain technology budgets making it even more important to constantly evaluate what’s working and what’s not.
To build a successful composable digital experience, you need to adopt a strategy that ensures components are easily discovered, installed, assembled and maintained. While there are some technologies that must remain more stable, there is always room to experiment with new innovations to improve experiences. Decide which technology is the backbone of your enterprise stack and then experiment with technology that extends its capabilities and data. Before deciding whether to invest in the long term, determine how it will serve the experience by using trials and proof of concepts. Align on KPIs you will seek to improve then and see how you might be able to move the needle.
Final Thoughts on Embracing Composable
The most successful organizations will be ready to adapt to the next strategic inflection point. As Andy Grove defines it — an event that will change the way we think or act, these are coming at shorter and shorter intervals.
From global pandemic to revolutionizing technology like ChatGPT, organizations need to adapt by constantly evolving their technology. Your organization will be equipped to navigate the ever-evolving digital environment by experimenting and making changes where possible and always funneling everything through the customer lens.
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