Editorial
The Gist
- Personalized architecture. Composable architecture enables unique system design based on specific organizational needs.
- Data visualization. Effective composable architecture involves understanding data flows and system connections visually.
- Core considerations. Content, customer data and optimization are critical, interconnected elements in a successful composable architecture.
The term "composable" has received a lot of attention in recent years. It's become a marketing term, with vendors rebranding their suite of products and services as composable. Additionally, other terms like "composable commerce" and "composable digital experience platforms (DXPs)" have emerged as a result.
But underneath it all, composable is an architecture. An architecture that promises a lot of value. It combines "best of breed" tools with agility. When done right, it can enable innovation.
But to do it right, you need to think about it as an architecture specific to your organization. It must reflect your industry and its specific business cases, your current investments in platforms, and the short- and long-term goals that those technologies support. Understanding that architecture is key to selecting what platforms and tools to invest in.
And that’s the beauty of composable. It allows you to select the tools that best fit your organization instead of having to try to change your organization to fit the rigidity of the tool.
To really understand your organization's unique composable architecture, you should start with an architecture diagram. Most composable architecture diagrams reflect the "Lego" like aspects of the architecture, showing capabilities as hexagons that connect to other services:
While this gives you a good overview of the types of capabilities and tools being employed, it is not very helpful as an architecture diagram. To really embrace the architecture aspects of composable, you need to think about how everything integrates; about how the data flows from one system to the next.
Expand the diagram to show the connections between the system:
As you think through the connections, you'll need to move the components around and think through not only how things connect today, but how they should connect in the future. What you'll end up with is something more valuable as an architecture diagram, and you'll notice certain patterns. The heart of your composable architecture will have the most connections:
These hubs of data are the heart of your composable architecture. They will be the most critical to the success of your architecture and will be the most difficult to replace, so it is imperative that you make sure the platforms and tools that support those capabilities are aligned to your business and architectural objectives.
While different organizations may have different capabilities at the heart of their composable architecture, content, customer data and optimization tend to be core to most digital experience architectures. While other capabilities can be ripped and replaced more easily, these make the core of your architecture and require more consideration and effort to replace when properly integrated.
Related Article: The Future of Digital Experience: The Shift Toward Composable DXPs
Composability & Content
Content is a core capability of any digital experience platform. It's not just your websites that consume and display content, but everything that touches your customer: emails, social, mobile apps, kiosks, call center scripts and more. Even personalization requires content.
Centralizing your content production and distribution is a core DXP capability. Without this capability your messaging can be inconsistent across channels and takes more effort and cost to bring together and distribute.
When evaluating a composable content solution, understand how the platform tool supports your content production processes, and how easy it is to publish and distribute approved content across your other composable solutions that need to consume that content.
While APIs provided by headless CMS's can solve the distribution problem, this is where content management platforms (CMPs) shine. With support for workflow, security and localization, they can manage the entire content production process and then publish the approved content using standardized API's.
Related Article: Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs): What to Know
Composability & Customer Data
While data is the lifeblood of an organization, customer data is the lifeblood of a digital experience platform. Especially with composable, there is a real risk of creating data silos that make it more difficult to compose effective experiences. Having a central capability to aggregate and distribute a central view of your customers can support several other composable capabilities.
While CRMs are great for supporting sales organizations, digital experience platforms often need to support customers that are never tracked in a CRM. Often, they support anonymous contacts that engage with the website and other channels that feed the sales process later in the customer journey.
To support these needs, customer data platforms (CDP) have emerged as a key composable capability. These platforms focus on aggregating customer data from multiple sources using real time and batch API's. They are used to centralize and master that customer data and then distribute it to other composable capabilities that can use that data to drive better experiences.
When evaluating other composable solutions in your architecture you should always consider how it will feed and consume data from the CDP. Tools that support easier integrations will ensure you can use the data you have when you need it.
Composable & Optimization
Most people acknowledge the value of personalization and testing in optimizing experiences to drive key performance indicators (KPIs) like conversions. Many optimization solutions focus on a single channel or are features of another solution. Tools that allow you to personalize or test web experiences or features of an email campaign management tool that enable you to personalize outgoing emails. The problem with these solutions is that they cannot easily be coordinated with the rest of your DXP stack. This can lead to inconsistent messaging across channels.
In a composable architecture, an optimization solution should be able to support multiple channels and tools, consuming data from the customer data platform to drive personalized experiences, leveraging content from your CMS or CMP platforms to ensure messages are consistent across all touchpoints in the customer journey.
When evaluating composable optimization solutions, understand how they are used to support personalized experiences across channels using other platforms in your composable stack. They should be able to support your web experiences but also other tools using APIs and be able to trigger messages to other systems.
Decisioning is another key capability, allowing you to leverage all the data collected in your CDP to determine what offer or action will help your customers advance their customer journey. This is also where machine learning and AI can most effectively be integrated into your composable solution, helping to drive continual improvement across your entire architecture.
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Final Thoughts on Composable Architecture
Beyond the buzzwords, composable architecture when done correctly can drive significant value for an organization. But achieving that value requires an enterprise architect mindset. It's not just adopting the suite of offerings from one vendor's composable suite. It requires making thoughtful decisions about your existing platforms and systems, integration patterns and data flows.
While content, customer data and optimization are usually at or near the heart of your DXP architecture, you need to focus on the core capabilities that your organization needs to be successful.
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