• by David Dodson , Op-Ed Contributor, October 1, 2024

Businesses without a transformation plan will lose. The AI wave has shown just how ill-prepared many are to adapt. The weak link across legacy institutions and hyper-growth startups alike is their tech stacks. Organizations have become tethered to technology decisions, causing them to be dependent on their roadmap of partners who are slow to adopt innovations, which threaten to disrupt their core business. 

The future of technology requires agility; this is the Achilles heel of countless companies that are unable (or unwilling) to recognize the problem, let alone resolve it.

The fix: Operate through the lens that digital transformation is not technology — it is enablement. Digital transformation is how you organize your teams, who you hire into them, and how those teams communicate and share information. In the past, management has passed off many of these decisions to their technology partners, organizing the business around their prescribed solutions. But those days are coming to an end. Both businesses and technology partners will either adapt or lose. 

According to Gartner, most mainstream companies list becoming a composable business as a strategic objective. Composability means all of an organization's individual pieces are composed to suit individual needs and orchestrated to serve business objectives. Adopting this method will help companies outpace their competitors by 80% in speed when implementing new features. 

A rapidly ascendant benchmark for this composable paradigm is replaceability — meaning that companies need to remain agile enough to replace any part of their infrastructure, even if it’s their anchor. Something as simple as making A/B testing for an e-commerce platform more granular ahead of the holiday season can be a consequential pivot, resulting in revenue loss if timelines stretch too long. 

With the existing monolithic infrastructures, the slightest change can send shockwaves through a business. But it doesn’t have to if the organization structures its people and technology infrastructure to support composability.

There are broader implications as well. Slow adoption or a lack of preparedness is also a bad sign to elite recruits looking to join a progressive, fast-moving company.

Embarking upon this type of composable journey is an involved process, but it will become a requirement as the benefits it poses now become the standard. And since it can take up to three years to structure an organization, the clock is ticking. Businesses that see those three years as a burden will fall behind. If you don’t already have a plan, take the next six months to form one. The first year is critical. Here’s how to approach it:

Audit Your Infrastructure to Identify Tech Debt

Evaluate all technologies in your architecture to understand their role in the business. Parts of your architecture could serve a purpose, but how they were addressed in the past may no longer align with where the business needs to go. Look for tech debt. Understanding how this is affecting the business and building a plan to eliminate any debt ensures you are building a solid foundation. This applies to the infrastructure and the data that flows through it. Businesses want to work toward a state where every bit of their ecosystem is optimized toward their business goals.

Complete a Competitive Analysis of Your Anchor Platform

A business’s structure will often dictate the central technology in its stack. For publishers, it might be content management systems. For retailers, it could be point-of-sale systems. A B2B organization may put the customer relations manager central. Perform a comprehensive competitive analysis of your anchor, including its integrations, required specializations, the roadmap and general product health. This evaluation will take a couple of months, but it is critical to ensure you have an anchor platform that best serves your company’s objectives and long-term business health.

Build a Composable Architecture Plan

With your anchor at the center, work on a composable architecture that meets your benchmarks. For a direct-to-consumer business, this would include not just the point-of-sale system but inventory and pricing, product and customer data, commerce and marketing content. Understand the needs of the teams fulfilling the functions and evaluate how best to integrate those functions with the anchor.

Execute a Pilot in One Quarter

Once you have a composable plan, develop a pilot program demonstrating its value. It should be something simple that can be executed on a short timeline and shows immediate and projected returns. Do it with minimal interference in current operations. The key performance indicator is having parts of the organization ask to be involved in the project.

The objective: Develop a clear picture of where a business is today, where it needs to be three years from now and a plan for getting there. Proving the case with a strong pilot that represents the impact composability can have will earn the organizational trust to work toward broader change.

Historically, adapting to change has been optional. However, we are rapidly approaching a future where businesses will have no choice.