Uniform blog/Bring harmony to digital teams by orchestrating composable systems
Bring harmony to digital teams by orchestrating composable systems
Bring harmony to digital teams by orchestrating composable systems
Nowadays, many leading brands hop on the bandwagon of composable architectures in quest of a streamlined way to create, manage, and publish digital experiences, assuming that, by replacing legacy systems with composable solutions, lower cost and greater agility will result. What those brands don’t expect, however, is the disruption to the experience-creation workflow. That’s because composable solutions tend to be developer-centric, and marketers and business teams often have a hard time adapting to them.
To succeed with composable solutions and improve time to value, businesses must harmonize their teams’ workflows. At a recent CMSWire webinar, Digital Experiences Without Drama: Empower Marketers and Streamline Development, I discussed this topic at length with Nick Barber, VP at Insight Partners. Below are what we both agreed to be the crucial tasks for brands that are on a composable architecture.
Understand how composability boosts experience creation
With composability, brands can readily fulfill the following requirements for engrossing and immersive digital experiences:
- Performance. High performance must accompany digital experiences, especially since Google changed its algorithm of search rankings a few years ago. Slow sites rank low on organic search results.
- Speed. Fast launches are imperative. Brands must seek the answers to these two questions:
- How can we build and launch experiences faster?
- How can we collect insight faster?
- Sustainability. Instead of replatforming every few years, businesses seek durability of their tech stack along with an easy way to add or remove solutions based on current needs.
- Employee satisfaction. A high priority is to ensure that all the digital teams are happy with how the tech stack facilitates their workflows. In other words, solutions that work well for developers must also work equally well for marketers and business teams.
Watch out for hidden pitfalls
A lot of hype surrounds composable solutions for good reason given their capability in addressing the above requirements. However, brands must keep in mind the obscure hazards (see below) that can upset the workflow balance between marketers and developers, causing dissension and infighting.
- New technology + old patterns = new problems. As well-known as the legacy suite monolith and its inherent downfalls are, a composable monolith could also emerge if you adopt composable tools in a similar fashion as you do legacy tools. Even if sourced from different vendors instead of one monolith, those tools still require glue code from developers in order to work together—not only at the start but also in case of future updates to the stack.
- Composable doesn’t compose itself. To use their best-of-need tools in concert with one another, brands need an additional technology layer that eliminates the need for integration by developers.
- Marketers end up in the back seat. Since composable tools are mainly geared toward developers, marketers lose control over the process of creating digital-experiences they used to enjoy. Instead, marketers must rely on developers for help in building, publishing, and maintaining experiences.
Embrace a better way
The pendulum of tech solutions has swung back and forth between those that favor marketers or developers. A much more effective approach exists, through which both developers and marketers can do their jobs well—called experience orchestration, which furnishes the missing pieces that connect all the tools (CMS, commerce, DAM, etc.) in your stack. As a result, going composable is seamless, fast, and flexible.
Compose your tech stack with DXCP
Gartner recently coined the term digital experience composition for the idea of experience orchestration. As a new category, digital experience composition bridges disparate systems and harmonizes the workflows of developers and marketers. Consequently, brands can craft relevant experiences across channels with the latest and greatest best-of-need tools.
By serving both marketers and developers, composable enables organizations of all levels of digital maturity to create different customer experiences. Nick Barber dives deeper in his blog, Balancing team workflows with composable architectures.
For more details on how to gain the cost and agility benefits of composable systems without causing workflow-related conflict among developers and marketers, watch the webinar.
More about digital experience composition
Bring harmony to internal teams with composable technologies
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