Uniform blog/Why the rush to composable is not paying off for marketers
lars birkholm petersen
Lars Birkholm Petersen
Posted on Oct 19, 2022

4 min read

Why the rush to composable is not paying off for marketers

Marketers and other business users who build digital experiences have come to realize that their technologies and architectures cannot take them where they aim to go. That’s because the systems and workflows they’ve adopted are not agile enough to keep up with the rapidly changing customers demands and stay ahead of the competition. As a result, companies might spend years building sites with tools that are already outdated at launch.
What’s required is a framework that ensures that brands can quickly and effectively launch digital experiences with optimal time to value: a composable stack created and orchestrated by digital experience composition platform (DXCP). Companies that shy away from adopting DXCP would fail to provide their teams with the speed, flexibility, and control they need to do their jobs and to stay relevant in the fast-changing and ever-growing digital arena.

The problem: composable tools do not deliver on their promises

Marketing and business leaders have coalesced around composable architecture as the savior on the belief that updating their stack to composable would ensure a smooth sailing for the creation of next-gen digital experiences. That’s far from being true, however. Even though composable frees companies from the constraints of a single system with a multivendor environment of “best-of-need” tools that can be added to the existing stack, the architecture is no home run. Composable systems require that organizations task developers with building code that enables these tools to work together effectively, which often takes a tremendous amount of time and effort. As a result, organizations find themselves in self-induced vendor lock-in yet again.  
Several other issues are also at play:
  • Composable doesn’t compose itself. To make composable architectures work, developers must design, write, and maintain large amounts of “glue code” to connect solutions. This complex, low-value code—which “glues” these composable systems together—takes valuable developer time and resources. In addition, they must churn out and maintain more glue code every time a composable tool is added to the stack, triggering a continual barrage of low-value chores. 
  • Developers are overinvolved in the process of creating digital experiences. Building, updating, managing, and publishing digital experiences within composable systems all require help from developers, depleting productivity and scalability.
  • Business users are left out in the cold. Because they must rely on developers to complete their tasks, business users end up waiting after submitting IT tickets, which are at times stuck in a backlog. Business users also lose the control they are used to with their previous solutions. 
  • Headless CMSes must be constantly rebooted. With CMS being a crucial part of tech stacks, the limitations inherent in headless CMSes, such as data models that don’t meet the changing requirements, are particularly problematic. 
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The solution: DXCP offers a better way for implementing composable architectures

DXCP is an ideal product for managing composable stacks because it eliminates the need for glue code and ends the workflow battle between developer-centric and business-user-centric tools and technologies. In essence, DXCP orchestrates the composable, API-first services for creating and maintaining digital experiences even though the stack lacks a seamlessly integrated collaborative environment. Consequently, business users have full control of the experience-creation process. 
DXCP offers three components: 
  • No-code tools for business users with which to create experiences independently without developer assistance. 
  • Prebuilt connectors, which eliminate the need for glue code and free up developers from having to write and maintain integration logic for numerous systems. 
  • Tools for implementing and delivering digital experiences, which give developers and IT the freedom to use the tools they prefer. 
By using DXCP to orchestrate a composable stack, companies also gain several crucial benefits:
  • Shorter time to market. Companies can quickly launch digital experiences to keep up with market demands.
  • Sustainability. With no need for integration, companies can maintain a long-term stack without having to replatform every few years.
  • Employee satisfaction. Developers are free to choose the framework they want to work in. Marketers and other business users have complete control over the digital-experience lifecycle. 

The future: technologies snap in and out

With DXCP orchestrating their composable stack, companies can add new technologies and remove legacy solutions any time—all without developers toiling away on glue code while marketers wait on the sidelines. 
That’s true composability at work and the future of digital experiences.
Check out this post by Rob Hoeijmakers on the concept of digital experience compositions and where is it relevant?

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