The thing with composable is it's all about business,
but it's also all about technology at the same time.
So composable tends to become very tech-heavy very quickly. So IT
architects and business owners and all that. But the challenge there is that,
in the tech we forget why we're doing it.
So, the reasons for the solutions' existence and
I think that's where we need to start that
you need to ask yourself the question: "What is actually the point of this thing?".
So composable
is interesting to me because it's new but it's not new.
It gets a lot of attention from the IT sector
simply because it's the name of something
that we've been doing for a very long time.
But in that focus on trying to bind systems together and
make them do new things and create solutions that last longer,
have a longer total return on investment,
we tend to forget a little bit about
the people actually working with those systems because we
end up breaking apart the business solutions which
makes sense because the individual component parts can be
you know replaced and improved and all that.
But it also means that as a user of composable,
a person that's actually just trying to get their day job done,
you have to now relate to multiple different systems
that each solve a piece of the puzzle.
So imagine you're every day you need to log into
system A, B and C to get something done, if you're a marketing person, for example.
You need to work with multiple systems to get to launch a campaign online.
So imagine a composed
version of that. Yes you have the best systems of everything
but you need two to tie together to actually solve the problem and many of them do
tie together but your experience of working with them
will be one where you log in here,
you do a little bit of the job you need to do, then you log out, then log in here,
do a little bit of the second thing,
then you log into the third thing to get your work done.
And I think that's the shadow side of composable that
it makes a lot of sense from an IT
perspective and from an architectural perspective, and
even from a strategic business perspective.
But
when you
go all the way down into the nitty-gritty of day-to-day operations,
there's still a question, a fundamental question there that has not been asked.
How do we create it as a friendly experience across composable platforms?
That to me is one of the really exciting
things about what's going on. I think we're
at a point where we were sort of getting ready to nail
composable and what it means and the questions we need to ask.
But the next way will be how do we actually make it
something that is enjoyable to use for day-to-day people.
So imagine an example of IT systems, right?
You will have in a best-of-breed context, in composable,
you'll go out and select
the best thing for sending out a newsletter.
The best thing for doing personalization,
the best thing for doing e-commerce, content, and so on.
So, you end up with maybe 5 or 10
systems that comprise your overall composable solution.
They all tie together in the website, so they
all sort of leverage a little bit of this,
a little bit of that, and that makes up the overall customer experience.
But for you to create that customer experience,
you have to imagine sending out a newsletter, for example.
You may create some content in the CMS to make it available for the newsletter.
So, you log into the CMS, you do your thing, and make it all nice and pretty.
Then you log out of that, log into your email system,
take a look at that and figure out, okay, so we need this content from over here,
pull it into an emails like the list that you wanna, you wanna go,
maybe you want to personalize it.
So you log out of the email system and into
the actual personalization engine and set up some segments and
some criteria to sort of make each email unique.
You tie your lock back into the email system and
tie that in and now you have your email.
Right?
So in the process of doing that,
you've essentially logged in and out of three separate
systems to accomplish what you need to do.
And
that's the reality we're looking at right now because
these systems don't necessarily know about each other,
they need to be interconnected and talk to each other
and frankly, we lack standards to make this go.
It's always at the moment at least something that needs to be built for the
situation rather than something that just works.
Sometimes it does, but more often than not it doesn't.
So it's definitely something to watch out for
as you build out these composable solutions.
We're sort of on the cusp of solving the first big problem,
which is to extend the lifetime of the solutions we're building
the next way will be how do we make this accessible to sort of quote unquote,
normal people that are using these systems?
And I think the business needs to come
together and create standards that will enable these composers
platforms to essentially talk to each other instead of
agencies and development companies building out these integrations,
uh, you know, one off for each customer.
I think there's a great responsibility on us as technology platforms and vendors to
agree on standards that will enable us to talk to each other.
So part of the work that we've done in, Ucommerce since, you know,
for for 13 years has been to enable our e commerce platform
to talk with a content management system to create a seamless whole.
And what's interesting is I I had this thought that maybe this
was an obsolete way of thinking of things in in compostable.
But as I was thinking more about it,
I actually think it's the way it's the path forward for everybody that's
we have sort of evolved a way where we can
connect with multiple content management systems out of the box.
So you essentially get the same overall experience across content and commerce
log into one and you have access to to to that.
But it doesn't really matter for us which content management system we work with,
because the experience is essentially the same because due
to the way that we connected with now,
the challenge with it is that our
way of doing that is proprietary. It's something we build for ourselves.
So only we can do it.
And I think maybe there's a there's a larger
mission here at play where we need to give up
that control of that and and start creating industry standards
to enable these things to talk to each other.
I think that's where we need to go as an industry.
May 28, 2024 06:15 AM Delete
Wonderful blog! I found it while surfing around on Yahoo News. Do you have any suggestions on how to get listed in Yahoo News? I’ve been trying for a while but I never seem to get there! Appreciate it.