composability

Why digital documents hold the secret to composability

“Organizations practicing high levels of business composability are operating one to two years ahead of their peers.”—Gartner, 2002

A focus on survival is not a sustainable business strategy

Mindset is everything in business culture. Attitudes following the COVID-19 pandemic followed two tracks.

The first was to survive the turmoil, or worse still, to lock up the shutters and hope the storm blows over soon. These negative, submissive, attitudes around the boardroom table lead to an investment strategy best described as containment, not invention. Simply aiming to reinforce stability in a turbulent world is a losing strategy when change is a constant.

What’s become apparent, is that businesses are prepared to see the risk of change to be an opportunity, not an existential threat, fair better. They are more successful, and more fleet of foot to grasp the nettle and ride on the waves of market changes.

Naturally, to make confident decisions in a data-driven world requires the installation of an organizational design that’s fit for purpose. And, according to Gartner, what that looks like is the triumvirate of composable thinking, resourcing, and technology.

Composable business design constructs

So says Gartner, composable business designs prepare leaders to make decisions that would have been too risky without the architecture of composability. Put simply, it’s about equipping leaders to make sweeping changes to a strategy with the confidence provided by two main things:

  1. Good market and performance data, and by having a resourcing and;
  2. A service delivery capability that’s prepared for change and adaptive enough to make changes in direction without inflicting a long tail of costs.

Break-down point number two on this shortlist, and we can quickly pinpoint some areas of business design that ARE NOT currently adaptive enough to cope with change. These are:

  1. Enterprise IT—and specifically centralized data analytics and inflexible SaaS and backroom applications.
  2. Supply chain—particularly workforce resourcing agenda

According to the Gartner report “Adopt a Composable DXP Strategy to Future-Proof Your Tech Stack,” 60% of mainstream organizations will use the composable business model as a strategic objective by 2023.

A time to rethink organizational design and the shape of IT

To attain the organizational ‘agiliization’ being highlighted by Gartner demands that traditional approaches to how some of the structural decisioning that goes on in an enterprise is adapted.

This mindset change, for many mature organizations, can be the most difficult obstacle to overcome. Generally, resourcing and IT behaviors become entrenched in organizational structures, leading to department leaders squabbling for budget and resources.

Steering a course through this internal conflict is non-trivial and requires strong leadership. Even when the mindset issue is resolved, the elephant in the room will be the bigger question of how to realign and rightsize IT.

The composable digital business

The composable digital business design brings together three elements of mindset, technology architecture and approach.

According to Gartner, a composable digital business applies the core principles of composability (modularity, autonomy, orchestration and discovery) to the foundations of its business architecture (the business model, enterprise operations and strategy) in order to master the risk of change and reach untapped business value. (Source: Becoming composable, Gartner Insight Report, 2022)

core design principles

Adopting this approach means that every aspect of the business and its tech stack is seen as modular and changeable. But, what are the mechanics and components of this new architectural philosophy?

The composable information architecture

Digital data fabric

The foundation of a composable digital business is a digital data fabric. This is an umbrella layer of information management spread across the enterprise (like a fabric) to harvest and manage data. Pre-preparing data integrity and sourcing for composition—for example by installing APIs and data linkages to all of the sources of data—brings the added agility to add more without coding or scripting. Another feature of digital data fabric technology is the ability to underpin new custom data capture, processing and analysis solutions needed to adapt the data management design over time.

Production of ready-to-consume data made possible by a digital data fabric makes time to value of new information solutions more attractive. It also makes it simpler to produce more fine-grained information solutions at the edge of the enterprise, where customer engagement and data decisioning increasingly happen. Adopting this federated approach to data analytics reduces latency and further accelerates the pace of change.

Digital cloud spaces

Ideally, any digital data fabric should itself reside on an autonomous cloud container that can be replicated, adapted, scaled, governed, and secured using cloud clustering methods and principles. This ensures a high level of future-proofing while installing appropriate cybersecurity safeguards and IT governance policies—all while offering lower support and maintenance operating costs.

Federated consumption

Data preparedness—in the form of a digital data fabric—is essential to the composable business model. So too is giving decision-makers and information workers the means to leverage insight to create new communications, processes, data capture mechanisms, and source answers to new questions.

To equip decision-makers at all levels of the enterprise to harness information source and data processing capabilities requires a federated approach to creating new digital micro-solutions.

There has to be a technology substrate operating at the edge of the enterprise; a way to de-skill IT and bring information access to a broad audience of consumers across and beyond the enterprise, equipping them with the autonomy to harvest value from data. This is where intelligent digital documents enter the frame.

Documents have played a key role in businesses, and they will again

Documents have always performed a role in businesses to structure and communicate information. This is, in part, thanks to their autonomy of use. They act as a self-contained data transport, able to interact between different people, assets, and entities.

Think of an invoice and how it structures data into boxes that make it easier for recipients to interpret and carry data between organizations. Consider too, the role of larger documents, like manuals or product instructions, that curate content into chapters and sections to bring organization and structure to content in such as way that humans find it simpler to understand. Beyond this communications role, hard-copy documents have been a trusted answer to capturing data.

What’s more, documents are highly accessible. They de-skill composition and provide an excellent conduit for unstructured data. They bridge between organizations, forging a ‘soft link’ between siloed data processing systems.

What’s changed then, is not the usefulness of documents and their role, but the context and environment of use.

Intelligent digital documents, the digital document canvas

A digital document canvas is a new kind of digital construct designed for the modern age of digital business.

These autonomous files perform a similar role to traditional documents in the enterprise, bridging between systems and departments, empowering information workers to find answers to new questions, and equipping workers to communicate and share information in more engaging ways. Moreover, digital documents de-skill the task of working with data, so information access and data processing become federated to the edge of the enterprise, bringing autonomy to individuals and departments.

While the role of a digital document canvas is similar to its hard-copy analog predecessor, digital documents are smart. In addition to content, they carry with them design rules, and if/then logic. Unlike a traditional web page that relies almost wholly on its platform environment, digital documents are more autonomous and can be structured into sections. This enables them to work and function in a similar way to an autonomous paper document.

In a digital age, these smart digital documents must operate within a controlled ecosystem governed by IT professionals. This is where the symbiotic relationship begins between the digital data fabric and the digital document canvas.

In short, digital document canvases make the ideal consumption layer of a composable digital business. They forge a new kind of partnership between ‘the business and IT.’ In this new deal, IT architects govern the shape and form of the digital data fabrics that coexist on one or more digital cloud spaces. Residing on these digital data fabrics are the digital documents that equip information workers to do their jobs, unfettered by the need for coding and scripting skills to turn data into value.

Final thoughts

Composable digital businesses are adopting a new way of thinking. This is applied to people, systems, processes, and business architecture in similar ways, and forms a pervasive new culture that fosters new behaviors.

It’s difficult to envisage this new form of information management culture being successful and sustainable unless grassroots decision-makers across the organization are equipped with the accessible and easy-to-learn and use tools needed to lever advantage from data fabric investments.

Digital documents—framed, and somewhat constrained by IT professionals— offer the required modularity for composition and show themselves to be the obvious smart alternative to avoid a free-for-all of custom apps and dashboards developed by untrained citizen developers.

The last word goes to Gartner—“At successful organizations, the CIO will act as evangelist, engineer, and orchestrator, as he or she views change as a tool, provides guidance on modular designs that enable change, then helps to execute it.”