Composable Business: The Future of Enterprise

With the COVID pandemic hitting the world like a shocking tsunami, businesses took a hard hit. In 2020, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a survey of 5,800 small businesses in the United States. The survey aimed to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on small businesses, including their operations, finances, and employment. The survey was conducted by researchers from several institutions, including Harvard Business School, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Chicago. The result specified that around 43% of the respondent businesses temporarily closed their operations due to COVID-19. 

But, at the same time, businesses like Uber Eats, Amazon, Zoom, and others flourished during the pandemic due to their customer-centric adaptability.

The businesses that flourished during the pandemic realized quite early that the preferences of customers were changing. Following this, they changed their business landscape and were some of the early adopters of the culture of remote working. 

Hence, surviving amidst the chaos in the business world was possible due to a composable architecture and mindset. But what is business composability? What is the reason for the majority of businesses not having been involved in it yet?

Well, this article intends to give you clarity on those aspects and help you understand almost everything associated with the future of business composability. 

Understanding Business Composability

In simple words, business composability is the ideal or building block that helps you adapt to rapidly changing and evolving business dynamics. It is more like a natural acceleration of all digital businesses, which allows them to deliver agility and resilience as per market demand. 

Composable architecture in business means building an organization using specific interchangeable blocks, such as process, mindset, and technology. Businesses rearrange these blocks to make their businesses fit and recover from any situation. 

With such an approach, businesses tend to break down a single block of applications into various understandable components. 

As a result, each of the components can undergo development, scaling, and maintenance integrations independently, without relying on one another. As a result, businesses get a leading edge by adopting new processes and technologies proficiently. 

Reasons Why Composable Business is the Future of Enterprise

Composable innovation in business will soon become the future of the enterprise. Here’s why:

1. Hybrid Work Culture is Evolving

As per Gallup, 60% of the remote-capable employee respondents stated that they would like to be part of a hybrid work culture in the future.

As the productivity of businesses relies on their employees, this urge for a hybrid work culture can’t go unaddressed. But for implementing a hybrid culture, the companies must be extremely purposeful and maintain consistency in delivering employee experiences, irrespective of the location they are in. Hence, a composable business is what would help the organizations.

A composable architecture within business practices will allow companies to build personalized communication and optimal employee experiences. It will help the businesses adopt hybrid cloud computing for culture-specific use cases, which isn’t possible with just any generic or single cloud application. 

2. Business Communications are Changing Immensely to Derive Experience

The customer experience with businesses is evolving, and there’s a modern way of accepting business services. Gone are the days when ad-hoc interactions played a part in managing business communications with customers. Today, the experiences have evolved beyond what the usual on-premise communication facilities can achieve. 

Composable business innovation allows businesses to evolve beyond any specific ad-hoc interaction. It is to deliver well-curated and complete experiences to customers using technologies and platforms. You will have the flexibility and feasibility to deliver astounding experiences to your customers that add value and boost the scope of earning their loyalty. 

3. Catering to the Needs of Employees’ Experience is Crucial

Just like customers, businesses should also cater to the needs of good experiences for their employees. A composable business will have everything it needs to integrate or build personalized employee experiences by adding technology solutions to its applications. 

For instance, a calling function can be added to the sales application for your sales employees to take follow-ups with the leads directly. Apart from that, a video conferencing function can allow a development team to collaborate more proficiently to derive an efficient product. 

Composable business architecture is somehow driving the employee experience on a positive scale, and productivity, brand perception, and retention rates are increasing immensely. 

Foundation Blocks of Attaining Business Composability 

For a simple understanding, business composability is more like a dynamic and digital experience for businesses to adopt new changes seamlessly. If you intend to set up a composable architecture for your business within operations, then here are the foundation blocks you ought to implement:

1. Understanding the Principles of Business Composability

Composable business architecture is categorized into four principles, that are crucial for any organization to understand before implementing the same into operational practices. The principles are:

• Discover- It is the idea of taking action faster when any potential change occurs in your specific business domain. 
• Modularity- It is the approach of replacing the interchangeable blocks of composability in a very agile manner to curate the operations for achieving desirable outcomes. 
• Autonomy- It is the idea of targeting independent business units for developing core resilience. 
• Orchestration- It is the approach of combining all of the functions to help the business adapt to the changes at a faster rate. 

2. Develop a Composable Mindset

The next thing businesses must do to integrate the concept is develop a perfectly composable mindset. It is an approach where the business must know and understand the things that are currently happening or might happen soon in the future. Hence, this will help you know what your business demands for adopting a flexible infrastructure and making new changes. 

For developing a composable mindset, you will need to determine a few things in correlation with your business, which include:

• Evolution plan of your business in the next 3 to 4 years
• Shift of competitive environment for your industry
• Scope of change in expectations and needs of the customers
• Types of business models that you can adapt in the coming future
• Types of products or services that can help you stand out in the crowd

3. Build a Composable Architecture

As businesses are now taking the digital leap, it is important for them to prepare their operations to withstand any continuous changes or uncertainties in the market. COVID was an uncertainty for businesses back in 2020. 

Examples of composable architecture are hybrid and remote work systems. No one literally predicted the idea of having virtual workspaces before the pandemic infiltrated the world. The businesses that weren’t designed to adapt to such changes perished. They either lost their scaling opportunities or were shut down due to bankruptcy. 

One thing is evident: businesses cannot predetermine the processes, workers, or systems at any point in time. Instead, what they can do is build a business system that is composable and can adapt to almost all situations. 

4. Avail Composable Technologies

Just like your business architecture, the technologies must be composable too. Without them, running a composable business will just be a theory. If the existing tools and technologies cannot scale or change as the market shifts, you won’t be able to cope with the changing process. 

Composable technology is not about composing specific software solutions within business operations. Instead, you must ensure that every technology within your stack is composed efficiently. Starting from infrastructure management solutions to data integration, every technology should be considered. 

Hence, this will help companies evolve to share data across various systems by iterating on technologies. As a result, this will be helpful mostly in keeping the people connected within the remote environment. 

Conclusion

A composable business is the future of enterprise operations, as the pandemic has given real-time reality to traditional business architectures. Today, composability is one of the most integral things to consider if you want to grab all business opportunities, have desires to expand, and keep upscaling operations to adapt to the market’s demands. 

Businesses can adapt by integrating composable software, building a composable IT infrastructure, and utilizing cross-functional teams. With the need for change being a major point of concern for businesses, composability is going to be the new normal. 

If you want composability in your business architecture, then avail the services of STL Digital and get on the right track to facing any situational challenges in the market. 

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